Broadband ISP Olilo Start Selling New L2TP Service to UK Users
Internet provider Olilo has today announced the introduction of an L2TP (Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol) service from £10 per month inc. VAT, which is a service that people or businesses can use to establish a secure (virtual) “tunnel” to transmit data packets between two points across a public network.
At this point some readers with less familiarly may get confused, as our description makes it sound a lot like a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and there are indeed similarities, which can be confusing. But L2TP is not an alternative to a VPN, rather it’s a protocol that can be used to make a VPN.
A number of UK providers offer services like this to more advanced internet users and business customers, although only a few (e.g. Andrews & Arnold – here) advertise it more publicly alongside clear pricing. Olilo has just become the latest to join that club:
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“The service allows any UK broadband user to tunnel into Olilo’s network and receive a real public static IPv4 address, routed IPv6, and full inbound connectivity without needing to change ISP. It’s primarily aimed at users stuck behind CGNAT or those wanting proper inbound access for things like self-hosting, VPNs, game servers, remote access, and home labs,” said the announcement.
Olilo notes that one useful side effect of this service is also greater resilience. “Customers already using PPPoE-based services such as Openreach can keep the same public IP and avoid CGNAT even during WAN failover scenarios – for example if their fibre line drops, and they fail over onto LTE/5G,” added the provider.
The tunnel can run on MikroTik, pfSense, OPNsense, VyOS, Linux and most standards-compliant routers/firewalls.
Key Service Details:
£10/month inc VAT
Static IPv4 included
Routed /48 IPv6 included
No setup fees or contract lock-in
Available UK-wide on any existing broadband connection
We have queried whether the provider has any speed restrictions on this service.
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UPDATE 1:14pm
Olilo’s website states that service throughput is “capped only by your underlying line” and under ‘data’ it also states “unmetered (fair-use)“, although fair-use is not defined.
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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The ‘most standards compliant routers’ is pulling a lot of weight there.
A lot of home routers confuse L2TP with L2TP over IPSEC which is a specific (albeit common) use of L2TP, and they don’t always give you a means to separate the two.
A&A get away with it because their typical user is savvy enough to realize things like this (and probably have their own router anyway). But advertising such a service for the average user.. their support lines will be having fun..
I don’t think the average user is looking for an L2TP tunneling service.
I really don’t see the value here over a Tailscale type of remote access solution. Maybe there is something I’m missing?
It allows you to keep the same IP addresses and move between providers.
It provides potentially better routing and the ability to chat with the staff if you have an issue.
It gives you static v4 and v6
It gets round CGNAT
It allows you to keep inbound services working even if you fail over to a backup connection etc.
Finally an AA alternative.
I prefer these to AA – they do sort of the same monitoring and the tech support is very good. AA let me down, and it felt like the guy was not interested and had a “sod off” script – so I left
This was about 6 months ago – but I just felt £85 for 1Gbps was pushing the limits for me
Looks like there is no speed or usage restrictions, its on the spec detailed on the website Mark.
“capped only by the underlying line”.
I tested it today – I got over 7Gbps on it – then they limited me to 2.5Gbps for CF customers. They are working on a few profiles they said. I spent most of the day on Discord with them testing it on an ASUS router
> We have queried whether the provider has any speed restrictions on this service.
The linked page states: “Throughput: Capped only by your underlying line”
Nice! I’m happy to see AA is getting competent competitor (saying it as an AA customer).
I signed to A&A’s version of this a a few months ago out of curiosity. I’ve been using it to get ipv6 on my Virgin Media connection and it’s worked very well. But it’s limited to 500mbps and 8TB a month, so this version from Olilo looks better value. I think I’ll give it a go as a test of their service. I can’t get proper FTTP yet.
“On PPPoE-delivered broadband? The L2TP tunnel is free for you”
Not fully clear, is this for their PPPoE customers?
Yeah it is for current customers on PPPoE based auth, I’ll get the web guys to get that amended to make more clear.
Now this could be useful with Zzooomm doing CGNAT.
Be interesting if it can reliably handle symmetrical 2.3Gbps line speed.
It can – They have a profile 2.5/2.5 just for that. Just got to ask
I pulled oer 7 on it today both ways
Depends on Zzooomm and Olilo peering and port speeds. If the default path is LiNX, then Olilo has 2x4Gbps and Zzoomm has 100+10Gbps…
Looks like an interesting product — but a shame that it’s over L2TP instead of Wireguard…
Wireguard is more CPU intensive due to ChaCha not being supported in older CPUs and kernels. This will affect data transfer speed.
Whilst encrypted tunnels would be nice from an end user perspective it would be a lot more overhead to be able to handle those at high speeds. It’s fairly easy to terminate a L2TP session on the same class of hardware as you already use as a BNG, it requires a completely different setup to support encrypted tunnels particularly if you want high throughput.
This is more for “I need a static ip over a connection that doesn’t normally provide one” than for “I want to hide my traffic from my ISP/the network i’m on”. For the latter use case you’ll want a VPN of some sort.
It’s also handy for keeping your olilo IP over a backup connection (such as 4G/5G) if you are on openreach at least, i’m not sure if they’ll figure out a way to do it for the CF users who don’t have PPP Creds.
It sounds like a good way to get some free transit! Take a 100G port at a common IXP (LINX LON1/LINX LON2/LONAP) and go nuts.
Nice try 😉
Could someone take L2TP from you in anticipation of a migration, and then get those IP addresses allocated to their broadband service when it goes live? And would that only be possible where PPPoE was used?
Heya,
They sure can 🙂
The only change would be that the PPPoE details would change realm.
Aydan
Saw it mentioned, ordered yesterday, working well today.