Rogers IPv6 Status

[foodgodessto]

Hello,

I'm wondering what the current IPv6 status is within Rogers.  A search on the forums only shows 10 topics over the past year that even mention IPv6, and there doesn't appear to be any official communications from Rogers since IPv6 day last year.

I know that Rogers (supposedly) supports IPv6 tunneling (although the only person to ask about it did not get any responses).

[JohnnyP]

What will the switch to IPv6 mean to me in layman's terms? i.e. will speeds improve? Will I need a a modem upgrade etc.?

[Datalink]

For an intro, have a look at the following article, down to the end of the section titiled "The Theory". 

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ipv6-the-future-of-net-addresses-explained-712153

What will it mean to you?  In theory, nothing different from what you already do.  The problem is that ISP support and readiness is critically important to make this work with zero effort on the part of the end user.  In Canada, I don't think that any ISP, except for possibly a couple of the Third Party Internet Access providers are really ready for IPV6 use.  Comcast in the U.S. I believe is almost at 100 % in terms of IPV6 usage. 

In theory this will make networking much simpler going from a WAN to a LAN address as there will not be a requirement for any Network Address Translation which is done by the modem or router, depending on your configuration.  This may result in a marginal increase is throughput.  Whether or not it is measureable is a good question. 

To make IPV6 work, there may or may not be an upgrade required to the Hitron Modem.  I know there are efforts underway to address issues with IPV6 implementation both at the modem and network level.  There was to have been some news posted or released by one of the Rogers Network staff regarding this, but that has not happened yet, and I don't know what the hold-up is.  There are more posts on the DSLreports site regarding IPV6 on the Rogers network.  In terms of your own personal equipment, if you have a recent router, it is probably ready to use IPV6, as are your devices.  It might just be a matter of enabling IPV6 in the router settings for example, but without ISP network support, it won't go anywhere.  So, for now, with some effort it can be done, but for the masses, its a sit back and wait for it to happen situation.   If someone else has better info, I'd love to have them post a few comments....

[timlocke]

It would be great if Rogers could tell us humble customers what the status of the IPV6 rollout to cable users is!.  I use the 6RD with a Dlink router behind a CGN3 in bridge mode.     When the 6RD service was introduced there was a message from Rogers in that long gone web page on IPV6 saying that if one had a suitable IPV6 ready router  and one went to page x in the router  set up and found a  2607:xxxx:xxxx::  IPV6 address there then 6rd would work on ....and it did and does.  All my devices including Rogers supplied smartphones all happily do V6 internally on WiFi. 

I'd like to see a beta program offered, no support of course, just have Rogers enable the V6 setup pages in the CGN3 series ( Hitron themselves say the gateway is fully V6 compatible) and issue a /64 to us relatively few people who will ask for one.   I would probably stay with my bridged setup but would certainly be prepared to invest some time in a beta program using Rogers supplied gateway.  ( Us retired network guys have the time and the knowledge!)

Maybe as the 6RD numbers are published in this thread back a couple of pages that it would help if more people tried it.

Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia all are available on IPV6 .

[88keyz]

I find that the 6rd service works fine but it would be really nice if Rogers fixed the 20 Mbit downlink speed cap on IPv6 traffic.  I'm on the Ignite 250u and get downlink speeds of over 300 Mbit on IPv4 services but IPv6 is limited to 20 Mbit.  Get the same results on the Hurricane Electric IPv6 service, only 20 Mbit down, this tells me the issue with with all IPv6 traffic and not just the Rogers 6rd service.  Before I came back to Rogers internet I was with Distributel and was able to easily max out my 60/10 service over IPv6 but Rogers has the down speed capped for some reason. 

There has been some discussion around this on the DSL Reports forum and it seems that there is a software problem somewhere in the routers handling IPv6 traffic and they haven't done anything about it. 

Come on Rogers, I don't care if you consider your IPv6 6rd rollout a non-supported service, to limit all IPv6 bandwidth through your system to 20 Mbit downlink is just rediculus.  Get this fixed now!

[Aelph]

@88keyz

What site are you using to test IPv6 speeds? I looked around and couldn't find anything really good.

Also I don't think Rogers is throttling IPv6 connections. If you are seeing the same speed drop using a Hurricane Electric tunnel (I'm assuming this is what you're using), then you likely have another issue. Connectivity in that tunnel is going to be IPv4 until it hits the HE servers. Only then it will exit as IPv6 traffic. The big question is why would you even want to throttle that?

[Datalink]

Fwiw, here's a link to the DSLreports thread.  Its a bit stale at this point as there hasn't been any recent news or announcements from Rogers on that thread:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r29521047-Internet-Rogers-IPV6-6rd~start=120

@timlocke, a retired network guy, welcome to the forum.  I'd love to see someone with a network background chime in and help sort out network issues, especially going through the traces.  Is this the page you were referring to?

https://web.archive.org/web/20130429222209/http://ipv6.rogers.com/tunneled-ipv6-access/

Thats a cached copy of the original page.

[Aelph]

Haha, that dslreports thread. The troubleshooting is all over the place in there; no wonder there's no progress. Everyone seems to be using the xfinity speed test from comcast to test IPv6 connectivity, but there's not a single IPv6 traceroute to the speed test servers (but plenty to google).

For the purpose of discussion, here is my testing methodology:

Speed test: http://speedtest.comcast.net/

Select server: Chicago, IL

Test results:

 

I'm using Rogers 6RD service and sure enough when I run the test I am seeing the same 20mbps bottleneck when using IPv6.

What is the IP of the server I'm really connecting to? After the test I ran 'netstat -an' and narrowed down the connections to the following two entries:

TCP 192.168.2.83:64297 68.87.72.56:5050 TIME_WAIT
TCP [2607:f090:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXX:XXX]:64317 [2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56]:5050 TIME_WAIT

I've bolded the destination IP addresses here.

What do the routes to these IP addresses look like?

Below is the IPv4 trace:

C:\Users\Aelph>tracert 68.87.72.56

Tracing route to speed-upload-01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.72.56]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router.asus.com [192.168.2.1]
2 12 ms 16 ms 19 ms X.X.X.X
3 17 ms 19 ms 19 ms 67.231.220.29
4 25 ms 30 ms 31 ms so-5-0-3.gw02.bloor.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.81.73]
5 46 ms 36 ms 28 ms van58-9-229-38.dynamic.rogerstelecom.net [209.148.229.38]
6 35 ms 29 ms 29 ms agg-eth5-pe05.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [75.149.228.121]
7 42 ms 44 ms 31 ms he-2-0-0-0-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net[68.86.86.33]
8 39 ms 38 ms 42 ms be-7922-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.86.91.166]
9 38 ms 38 ms 38 ms 10g-9-3-ur05.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.230.222]
10 35 ms 48 ms 29 ms te-8-1-ur08-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.229.102]
11 42 ms 43 ms 39 ms te-9-4-ur05-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.210.9]
12 34 ms 39 ms 38 ms speed-upload-01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.72.56]

Trace complete.

What's interesting here is hops 5 and 6. The traffic is leaving Roger's network and going directly into comcast's network. This is likely an established peering agreement between the two companies.

Below is the IPv6 trace

C:\Users\Aelph>tracert 2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56

Tracing route to 2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 2607:f090:XXXX:XXXX::1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 17 ms 27 ms 23 ms 2607:f798:10:436:0:241:5615:6237
4 20 ms 34 ms 23 ms 2607:f798:10:202:0:241:5614:4121
5 35 ms 41 ms 35 ms 2607:f798:10:63:0:690:6324:8089
6 35 ms 42 ms 35 ms 2400:8800:5f09:7::2
7 46 ms 47 ms 33 ms he-1-14-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [2001:558:0:f5db::1]
8 40 ms 44 ms 42 ms be-10206-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [2001:558:0:f5b8::2]
9 49 ms 54 ms 43 ms be-7922-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:0:f6e9::2]
10 49 ms 47 ms 46 ms te-9-3-ur09-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:300:139::2]
11 50 ms 45 ms 39 ms te-8-3-ur08-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:300:e9::1]
12 44 ms 48 ms 51 ms te-9-2-ur05-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:300:54::2]
13 48 ms 55 ms 41 ms 2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56

Trace complete.

This is a bit more difficult to read, but the IPv6 prefixes make some things a bit easier.

• 2607:f090 - Rogers 6RD
• 2607:f798 - Rogers cable (http://bgp.he.net/net/2607:f798::/32)
• 2400:8800 - PCCW Global (http://bgp.he.net/net/2400:8800::/32)
• 2001:558 - Comcast Teredo tunnel? All the Comcast servers have this prefix, but 2001::/32 is reserved for Teredo so I don't understand this.

What's interesting here is there is something between Rogers and Comcast on hop 6. I'm not exact who PCCW Global is, but they are probably a IPv6 internet backbone provider. If I was looking at why this connectivity is slow, this is the first place I'd look. Ideally Rogers should be establishing a similiar peering arrangement with Comcast for IPv6 traffic, but there are likely techincal/legal/economic reasons why this isn't in place yet.

If someone has the Hurricane Electric tunnel broker setup, I'd be curious to see what the traces to the same server I am using ([2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56]) looks like.

[Datalink]

Consider sending @damir a pm to see if he has heard anything recently.  Maybe the two of you, if you're interested, can chase this down and get a firm response from the Rogers network engineers who might be involved in this.

[88keyz]

Sorry, took me a couple of days but I was able to setup a Hurricane Electric tunnel and run the same tests you did.  Here are the results.

IPv4
tracert 68.87.72.56

Tracing route to speed-upload-01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.72.56]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  router [192.168.xxx.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    13 ms    22 ms    14 ms  66.185.90.149
  4    14 ms    22 ms    14 ms  pos-0-0.gw01.pr.phub.net.cable.rogers.com [66.185.81.174]
  5    26 ms    27 ms    28 ms  69.63.248.89
  6    35 ms    26 ms    29 ms  agg-eth5-pe04.111eighthave.ny.ibone.comcast.net [173.167.58.125]
  7    29 ms    29 ms    30 ms  he-1-14-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.87.109]
  8    34 ms    35 ms    33 ms  be-10206-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.86.226]
  9    39 ms    37 ms    35 ms  be-7922-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.86.91.166]
 10    34 ms    34 ms    36 ms  te-9-3-ur09-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.210.17]
 11    37 ms    35 ms    36 ms  te-8-3-ur08-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.210.13]
 12    35 ms    37 ms    35 ms  te-9-3-ur05.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.229.106]
 13    40 ms    36 ms    35 ms  speed-upload-01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.72.56]

Trace complete.

IPv6
tracert 2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56

Tracing route to 2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  2001:470:xxxx:xxxx::2
  2    13 ms    13 ms    12 ms  xxxxxxxx.tunnel.tserv21.tor1.ipv6.he.net [2001:470:xxxx:xxxx::1]
  3    14 ms    60 ms    12 ms  v218.core1.tor1.he.net [2001:470:0:c0::1]
  4    27 ms    23 ms    24 ms  100ge13-1.core1.chi1.he.net [2001:470:0:2db::1]
  5    21 ms    22 ms    21 ms  2001:559::db9
  6    24 ms    22 ms    22 ms  he-2-4-0-0-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [2001:558:0:f5a8::1]
  7    27 ms    28 ms    30 ms  be-7922-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:0:f6e9::2]
  8    21 ms    20 ms    21 ms  te-9-1-ur09-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:300:52::1]
  9    21 ms    21 ms    23 ms  te-8-3-ur08-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:300:e9::1]
 10    23 ms    23 ms    27 ms  te-9-2-ur05-d.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [2001:558:300:54::2]
 11    21 ms    21 ms    20 ms  2001:558:100e:0:68:87:72:56

Trace complete.

As you can see my IPv6 results are much the same as your 6rd test.  Modem is the CGN3ACSMR in bridge mode connected to a Linksys EA6900 running DD-WRT (because the IPv6 support in the OEM firmware is terrible).  I've tried different routers as well, same result.  Any IPv6 traffic over the Rogers network is capped at 20 Mbit (at least for downstream).  Don't think its a path issue because if it was then that would likely affect the ping and my IPv6 ping time to Chicago was lower than my IPv4 ping.

 Would be nice to hear from Rogers on this issue.  Again, even it the 6rd beta rollout is an unsupported service that doesn't mean that IPv6 traffic should be speed capped as it clearly is.  Its not hard to see that this issue affects more than just the 6rd beta.

Just for comparison here is a recent IPv4 speedtest from a Toronto server using the same modem and router settings.

Speaks for itself.

[zzq1015]

2001:558:xxxx::xxxx is not a teredo address

2001::/32 means a range from 2001:: to 2001:0:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff

Look at the Google Public DNS address: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844

[lethalsniper]

Just going thru my router setting and I have ipv6 enabled but when I ask Google what's my IP address it says I'm on ipv4 , should I disable ipv6 in my router ?

[Datalink]

Yes, Rogers has a long way to go in order for IPV6 to work on its network.  There have been efforts by others to push Rogers to get IPV6 to work, but I haven't seen anything posted by anyone recently.  @damir would be the person to ask if you wanted to get IPV6 working.  For now, if you're not fully up on IPV6, just disable it.

As for your issue with the second IP address dropping out, I don't have any explanation for it.  Perhaps its a stability issue as @RogersMoin as pointing out previously.  The interesting thing is that Shaw uses the second IP address all the time as they don't allow their customers to bridge their modems for the lower speed tiers, so, they activate a second IP address so that the end user can use the address with a specific device, which I would guess is a router.  So, the modem can handle a second IP address, and people have reported using it in the past on the Rogers network, but that is a very small group of people.

Try disabling IPV6 and see if that improves the stability of the modem.

[lethalsniper]

OK thanks. So I just disabled ipv6 in my router settings but there is nothing saying to turn on ipv4 ? Does it turn on automatic once ipv6 disabled. 

[Datalink]

IPV4 is always on, unless you have some firmware loaded on your router that allows you to disable it.  That would be pretty unusual.  You should also go in and turn off IPV6 on the individual devices as well.   The IPV6 firewall should remain enabled on the router however.

If anyone has a better idea as to what to do with Rogers IPV6 these days, I'm open to suggestions. 

Perhaps this situation will improve with the Gigabit service?  One can always hope.

[lethalsniper]

I don't think Xbox one has a ipv6 setting

[timlocke]

I use the 6RD  and it works fine.       I would have thought it would be in Rogers interest to move as many of their internal communications to  customer devices to IPV6  and also make it available to customers.    90% of people just won't notice but some of us will and be happy!

[lethalsniper]

Is there a reason why Rogers dosent support ipv6 in my area I'm on the 150 hybrid plan.

[timlocke]

I don't think Rogers 'supports' IPV6 for anyone yet.  

[lethalsniper]

Do I also have to disable the ipv6 on the Rogers gateway/modem ? I have it on bridge mode

[timlocke]

In bridge mode the Gateway is just a modem and doesn't know about anything but bits in packets.

[Datalink]

Its not the IPV6 in your area, its the type of IPV6 service that is supported.  I'm not into IPV6 yet, but I don't think Rogers supports native IPV6.  6RD yes, but I don't know all of the details that differentiate the two.  Its a little interesting as I believe that Techsavvy or Start supports native IPV6 and some of their comm lines piggyback off of Rogers Network.  So, its a corporate decision.  Others have pushed for it, but as I said earlier, there hasn't been any recent posts by anyone from Rogers on this issue.  For all I know it might be a dead issue within Rogers. 

Its a pretty sad situation in Canada overall.  I think the adoption rate is less than 1 % but I might be wrong.  Here's a recent article on IPV6:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/ipv6-celebrates-its-20th-birthday-by-reaching-10-percent-dep...