Giant has turned on IPv6, which should help cameras and home servers
Giant, the Liverpool based provider that sells broadband over several other companies’ fibre networks, has switched on native IPv6 across that network. As reported by ISPreview, the provider says the new addressing runs alongside the shared IPv4 addresses its residential customers have been using, and that most people will not need to change anything at all.
The thing being dealt with here has an ugly name and a very familiar symptom. Carrier grade NAT, usually shortened to CGNAT, means your connection shares one public address with a lot of other households, because the world ran out of the old IPv4 addresses years ago. Day to day you would never know. It surfaces when something outside your home tries to reach something inside it. A camera you wanted to check from work. A games console that reports a strict connection type. ISPreview lists self hosting, CCTV and security systems as the sorts of things that quietly stop working.
IPv6 hands devices addresses of their own again, so those connections have a way in without a shared address sitting in front of them. Giant’s own wording is that compatible devices can use IPv6 directly where a service supports it, and that anything still needing IPv4 carries on through the existing CGNAT setup. Read that second half carefully, because it is the limit of what has changed. A service that only speaks IPv4 is exactly where it was yesterday.
There may be a small saving in it for some people. ISPreview notes that Giant customers who wanted out of the shared address problem could already buy a static IPv4 address, usually around £4 a month. If IPv6 covers what you were paying that for, it is a line you might be able to drop. Check it against what you actually use rather than cancelling on the strength of an announcement, because nothing has been said about the static option going away.
Two things are worth keeping in proportion. This is a provider’s account of its own network, so how well it holds up is something customers will find out before anyone tests it independently. And IPv6 is not new. ISPreview points out that plenty of UK providers have run it for years, while some of the biggest, Virgin Media and TalkTalk among them, still have not.
If a strict connection type has been spoiling your evenings, our guide to broadband for gaming covers what actually matters there. Giant says its packages reach up to 8Gbps where the network supports it, though what speed you actually need is a better question than the headline number. And whoever ends up selling you the line, full fibre goes in street by street, so the availability checker is the place to start on your own address.