IPv6 Issue Breaking Mobile Apps on UK ISP Vodafone Broadband

Some customers of Vodafone’s home broadband service have, for much of the past month, been experiencing an usual problem that seems to cause internet connectivity and performance problems for mobile apps (e.g. BBC, Sky News, Gmail, ASDA and many more) when connected to home WiFi. But there’s a temporary fix.

A number of Vodafone’s Broadband customers, seemingly those who take their fastest Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based packages (the issue may not be restricted to them), have recently been informing us about some difficulty in using a wide variety of apps on their Smartphones. The bulk of these gripes seem to come from owners of Android based phones (e.g. Samsung), but it may impact other users too.

The issues themselves are extremely sporadic, ranging from slow loading to connectivity problems with specific features and all the way up to being completely unable to load certain apps. But at the same time, other apps seem to work fine, which usually indicates something wonky with the DNS (Domain Name System) or connection routing/peering.

After a bit of digging we found a good number of related complaints on Vodafone’s own Community Forum (examples here, here, here and here). Firstly, the good news is that Vodafone have finally become aware of a “routing issue” affecting their service and are working to resolve it, although it’s unclear when this will be fixed.

A Vodafone support agent said:

“We’ve identified a routing issue impacting a small number of users who use Android apps and it’s currently being looked into. Sorry for the disruption caused, we’re getting it resolved as quickly as we can. If you need more help with this, please speak with our Broadband Tech team on 191 free from a Vodafone mobile or 03333 040 191 from any other phone. They’re also available on Live Chat.”

However, this isn’t quite the end of the story, because – after a lot of trial and error – some customers eventually figured out that they could resolve the problem by disabling IPv6 internet addressing on Vodafone’s router. Long time readers will know that this is a particularly interesting development because the provider hasn’t yet deployed IPv6 support to their home broadband network and are a well-known laggard on this front.

On the other hand, having IPv6 enabled on a router for a broadband connection that doesn’t yet support it shouldn’t normally cause any problems, unless Vodafone has done something funny or is in the process of trying to implement support. We did ask Vodafone this week for an update on their IPv6 plans, but the ISP declined to give us an update on its progress.

In the meantime, customers wishing to disable IPv6 will need to access their router’s admin interface, change it to “Expert Mode” at the top right of the page and then go to the “Settings” tab along the top and click on “Local Network” (left-hand side). The IPv6 checkbox should be a little further down that page, so you’ll need to uncheck that and then click ‘apply’ at the bottom (at this point a router restart may help, but it isn’t always necessary).

Just remember that you may need to re-enable this once Vodafone either fixes the underlying issue or gets around to actually deploying IPv6, whichever comes sooner. Oh, who am I kidding, Vodafone’s roll-out of IPv6 will almost certainly NOT come sooner.