Broadband ISP PlusNet UK Set to Trial IPv6 on High Touch Network
Internet service provider PlusNet, which is part of the wider BT Group, has informed customers that they’re “now ready” to finally start trials of Internet Protocol v6 (IPv6) addressing on their “High Touch” broadband network. The ISP has previously only conducted a small scale technical trial on their “Low Touch” network (here) – used by c. 90% of customers.
Just for context. IP addresses help to connect your software and devices with others around the online world – like an ID number for your connection. The issue these days is that the existing IPv4 address space has been exhausted, which makes it difficult to add new connections without compromising by sharing IPs between many users (CGNAT, MAP-T etc.) or spending big to buy additional v4 addresses.
The long-term solution to the above challenge is adoption of IPv6 addresses, which are not directly compatible with IPv4 and so require a bit of an investment in order to make both work properly side-by-side (e.g. Dual Stack or other methods). So far both of PlusNet’s parents, BT and EE, have long since deployed IPv6 and that has left their smaller sibling to look a little out of sorts.
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The good news, as spotted by ISPreview, is that PlusNet’s Enterprise Architect (Network & OSS), Dave Tomlinson, has now announced that they are finally “ready to trial IPv6 on our High Touch broadband network“. The ISP operates 2 slightly different broadband networks, one for dynamic IP addresses (“Low Touch” – most of their customers) and one for customers with static IP address, have the broadband firewall turned on and a few other things (“High Touch“).
Dave Tomlinson said:
“We’ve been testing IPv6 internally on high touch and would now like to open up the trial to a few customers so that we can get some feedback and see how it works with people with different devices and different setups.
Spaces for the trial are limited so we might have to cap the number of applicants if there’s a lot of interest.
Trial criteria to take part is:
➤ You must currently have a static IPv4 address (or a 4 or 8 block)
➤ You must have an IPv6 capable router (Plusnet Hub 2 is fine or one of your own)
➤ We recommend you have at least one PC/Mac running Mac OS, Linux or Windows 10/11 in case you need to diagnose any issues.”
Dave later confirmed that they’re running a dual stack IPv4/IPv6 setup, so your (customer) router will get allocated both the existing static IPv4 and also a /56 IPv6 prefix. Devices on your LAN will continue to be allocated a private IPv4 address e.g. 192.168.1.x or 10.0.0.x, but will also be allocated one or more public IPv6 addresses where they support IPv6.
Dave explained:
“I’ve got a mixture of devices on my network where some support IPv6 like my Linux server, Mac and iPhone and some don’t like my lightbulbs and TV. The ones that don’t support IPv6 just work exactly as they did before I had IPv6. LAN traffic is IPv4 and then it’s NAT’d out to the Internet using the IPv4 public IP.
For the devices that do support IPv6 then where the service they are connecting to supports IPv6 like this forum or Netflix or Google then the traffic should favour IPv6. And where the service doesn’t support IPv6 like www.plus.net then it will favour IPv4. That’s mostly done at a DNS level, where if you get a AAAA DNS record with an IPv6 address it should try IPv6 first and where there’s only IPv4 DNS records it’ll just do IPv4.
There are other ways of doing IPv6 and IPv4 where you might only get an IPv6 address on your router and no IPv4 public address or you get a CG-NAT IPv4 and IPv6, we aren’t trialling any of those so on our trial you should see every device either getting both IPv4 and IPv6 or just IPv4 (potentially there are some IoT devices that just do IPv6 but unless you already have an IPv6 tunnel broker account or similar we probably don’t need to think about those at the moment).”
Customers who wish to take part should express their desire via this Plusnet Forum Thread, although only a small portion of their base are currently using the provider’s High Touch network. At this stage we don’t know how long this trial will last or when the final change may be fully deployed, but given that this is PlusNet then it’s probably best not to speculate (they’re infamous for long-running trials and IPv6 was first tested back in.. 2011! here).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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>2025
>Starting a IPv6 Trial
Jesus Christ
it isn’t so much about rolling out IPv6 in 2025 (other ISPs are even slower to adopt), it’s more the fact that it needs a “trial” when BT itself has had IPv6 deployed to all of its customers for several years now.
So you’d wonder what’s actually different about Plusnet (especially the low touch side) that is causing such glacial progress.
What is a high touch and a low touch network?
I thought plusnet was going to vanish, according to a lot of people that post on here, it seems not.
Not sure how much difference it will make to consumers, but it has to be done if IPv4 addresses are running out, in fact ran out ages ago.
https://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/04_Plusnet_IPv6_update_DaveTomlinson.pdf
Page 7.
I doubt plusnet will go, as its the value brand. BT was going – but now Marc has left BT that also looks to be stopping. (Good, the EE brand IMO isn’t as strong as BT)
“I thought plusnet was going to vanish, according to a lot of people that post on here, it seems not.”
Those repeated comments you’ve read come from a place of pure unfounded speculation. BT Group’s plan was and is to retain Plusnet as a ‘value’ consumer brand.
@Matt, cheers for that, now I know.
The thing I liked about Plusnet was that they left you alone and even with the few extras they offered, once you said no, not interested, that was the end of it
A friend is always getting contacted by BT, trying to get them to have their TV or mobile phone.
Also, customer service was okay with Plusnet and their router was just a normal router, no rubbish or bloat in the firmware, even if I did not use it for long 🙂
I just thought I would be nosy and did a comparison betweent BT and Plusnet and for 500Mb/s, Bt was only just £2.04 more expensive than Plusnet.
Not that I would go back to them, IO would not go back to an Openreach connection unless I really have to.
IPV6 has been around for over decaded and is a well established technology. So what took them so long, and why do they need a trial now?
It takes a long time because it adds zero value or benefit to the end user. The most anyone does visibly with IPv6 is run an IPv6 test. As long as IPv4 is still in use, and it always will be, IPv6 has little to no relevancy outside us nerds.
avoiding CGNAT is a benefit to end users. Ending the utter pointlessness of the IPv4 shortage is of huge benefit to ISPs, especially for newer firms that don’t have the legacy of massive address spaces.
Given that most big tech companies are using IPv6 then in reality customers will be using it whether they care or not. They shouldn’t have to care – if anything it means the ISP has done their job.
It’s not great that some older ISPs have dragged their feet on adoption, but it is unforgiveable that there are “greenfield” providers that haven’t had it available from day one – some of whom are happy to perpetuate the problem by adopting CGNAT…
@Notomnia, as time goes on, there will be sites that are IPv6 only.
There are some now, but they don’t affect us, but at some point it will.
As Ivor posted, avoiding CGNAT is a benefit to end users, which is correct.
My broadband provider support IPv6, but I do use a VPN most of the time, so my Ipv6 address is not really much good.
But it is there if I need it.
> @Notomnia, as time goes on, there will be sites that are IPv6 only.
Says who?
No site of any value will be prepared to cut off a substantial proportion of its customer base. You’re not going to see any significant IPv6-only sites until at least 99% of the clients have IPv6 access. And that’s not going to happen for decades, if ever, because of how slowly enterprises are at taking up IPv6 – they do not want to bear the ongoing costs of dual stack, especially dual sets of firewall policies.
IPv4 addresses are not in short supply at the content provider side: they’ve been sharing addresses between sites for years. If your site is behind a content delivery network or anti-DoS service (as most are), they are all sharing their public-facing IPs.
They had a trial once before. Something like ten years ago perhaps? Then they decided to rebuild their core network and rather than doing the sensible thing and baking IPv6 in from the start of that they killed off the trial.
So it’s even worse than ‘taking a long time to get around to it’. They’ve done all this before then given up.
It’s actually part of why I left PN for IDNet. I was disgusted by the apparent lack of technical ability and dropping standards of support. IDNet of course has had dual-stack IPv4/6 for perhaps 15 years now.
Was meant to read: “since over a decade”
IPv6 has been around for close on 30 years.
Shame I’m leaving them!
Jeremy how’s your IPv6? ;);)
IPv6 also still isn’t supported on EE’s Legacy network (It’s all very confusing as the old plans were also described as “Powered by BT” so I don’t know why its separate) and I’m guessing they are not going to invest the time in upgrading.
However they also haven’t established a migration path for existing Legacy customers to move onto their new plans so it’s all a bit of a mess in true BT/EE fashion.
It seems very strange BT would operate independent equipment between the brands and incur additional costs by duplication in doing so. I’d have thought EE/BT/Plusnet broadband services would terminate on the same equipment, share the same public IP pools and generally be the same service. After all cars are mostly badge engineering and this is largely the same. Even at the core, handling 3 ASN’s for the 3 brands wouldn’t exactly be very hard and actually much simpler from a NOC standpoint to manage traffic.
BT, EE and Plusnet low touch are all the same architecture and service.
Presume with all the low touch taken off the Plusnet high touch platform it hasn’t needed upgrades in a while and makes more sense to keep it running for now than to mess with the cookie cutter powering the rest of the BT, EE and Plusnet customer base.