IPv6 tunnel.... Ending. Hurry up PlusNet

[#1]

Quote from: Toady

6in4 tunnels work, sure but they are not going to be as good as the real thing.

I'm not so sure !  
I have IPv4 with Plusnet, and a 6in4 tunnel with Hurricane Electric, and while it seems unlikely but is true, most of the time (>80%) my tunneled IPv6 speed tests faster than native Plusnet IPv4 TO THE SAME speed tester locations. -

It's not just the speed, the latency to the far end of my IPv6 tunnel endpoint (i.e. Hurricane Electric in London's "Telehouse East" building) is usually a few milliseconds quicker than the latency to the Plusnet gateway ! -

As Plusnet and Hurricane Electric are located in the Telehouse Data Centres, I can only assume that Hurricane Electric has better capacity than whatever peering Plusnet is using.
I would rather keep my Hurricane Electric tunneled IPv6 performance, if Plusnet's native IPv6 speed and latency is the same as its IPv4 !

[#2]

Quote from: Nibiru

Quote from: Toady 6in4 tunnels work, sure but they are not going to be as good as the real thing. I'm not so sure !   I have IPv4 with Plusnet, and a 6in4 tunnel with Hurricane Electric, and while it seems unlikely but is true, most of the time (>80%) my tunneled IPv6 speed tests faster than native Plusnet IPv4 TO THE SAME speed tester locations. -

In your case, I don't disagree, but when I say tunnels are not as good as the real thing here's how it looks when you get past 10Mbit...

EDIT: After running more tests, I am not sure sure I trust the results from ipv6-test.com - depending on the country I test to, either IPv4 wins out by about 2:1 or IPv6 wins out at about 2:!, since I would expect both PlusNET and HE to use BGP peering and multiple possible bearers I'm honestly surprised by the results but stand by the idea that native IPv6 is always going to be the better solution than running IPv6 in IPv4 tunnels, if for no other reason that gaining the extra 20bytes of MTU.

[#3]

So tunnelbroker.net have 1862 active tunnels in the UK. A fraction of that will be plusnet subscribers (at least one, considering myself). All of that does not translate into much a commercial driver to do anything about providing ipv6.

And when the issues of ipv4 address space exhaustion gets more pressing plusnet won't get rightfully shamed as they should.

[#4]

Just had this mind-numbing web chat..."

gabrielhopkins: Just had the same stupefying chat.Not happy as found out that they have been testing ipv6 via samknows for over a year, and are possibly using this to argue with ofcom that they don't need to roll out ipv6. (I work in the industry) 

[#5]

My sixxs tunnel just stopped working (supposedly bounced emails; rubbish, my email server is fine).  Not very happy, but understandable that they are slowly turning off the service, or at least making it more fragile to force people onto real IPv6.

Pretty clear for me though: PlusNet has had 5 years since their trial (of which I was a part; and it Just Worked at the time, so I don't know what issues they ran into) in which time they've gone backwards, not forwards.  If they don't specify an IPv6 deployment date soon, I will switch. And it will be painful because overall I've been very happy with PlusNet and their generally excellent support and service offering. But as a professional I can't be stuck in the dark ages forever.

PlusNet certainly can no longer claim that they are a technical ISP at the forefront of technology.

NAT is a crappy band-aid which has caused a LOT of trouble for products and services. It is no solution by a long shot; the solution was well engineered 20 years ago, and quite well deployed over 10 years ago which is when I purchased a consumer-grade IPv6 compliant home router. So saying consumer tech hasn't caught up yet is rubbish too.

Basically: buck up, or start losing customers. We're sick of waiting.

[#6]

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@mwerle wrote:

And it will be painful because overall I've been very happy with PlusNet and their generally excellent support and service offering. But as a professional I can't be stuck in the dark ages forever.

I know exactly what you mean there. I've been promoting Plusnet for years because I've found them (mostly) reliable and providing decent support when needed.

PlusNet certainly can no longer claim that they are a technical ISP at the forefront of technology.

Indeed.