Plusnet: We talk to the Boss
FrequencyCast caught up with Plusnet, to discuss the upcoming move to IPv6, what challenges face Internet Providers, and where the Internet will be heading. Here's the full interview.
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We interview the boss of ISP Plusnet - Listen to our IPv6 Interview (15 minutes)
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Transcript of Interview:
Here's a transcript of our interview with Richard Fletcher, COO of Plusnet, recorded in May 2011:
Pete:
For our April 2011 show we looked at some big changes coming soon to the Internet, and it's something that goes by the name IPv6. Now at the moment, the Internet uses what's known as IPv4, and the addresses look something like 12.123.45.123. I'm sure you've seen those addresses before, but things are about to change, and we know it's been causing some concerns to our listeners.
Following the feedback to our feature in April, we were able to get to talk to the boss of one of the UK's leading Internet service providers to find out a little bit more about the effect that IPv6 will have on UK Internet users. We're now joined on the line by Richard Fletcher, who is the Chief Operating Officer at Plusnet. The first question we'd like to ask is an obvious one, really - why are we having to make all of these changes?
Richard:
The main reason that we're moving to IPv6 is because the current way of assigning IP addresses to customers is by using this old technology called IPv4, which was developed in the Sixties. Basically, the number of possible addresses are running out. In order for the Internet to continue to grow, the Internet community needs to move to this new standard, this IPv6 standard, and we are about to start our transition before IPv4 runs out, so we can look at what needs to be done and test all of our systems, and so on.
Pete:
Now, if I understand it, there's a lot of work that's got to be done before we can be fully ready for IPv6. Is this actually something that we should be worried about?
Richard:
We're not going to move wholly over to IPv6; we will do over time. I don't think it's something that people should be particularly concerned about. There's a lot of concern in the technical industry, because it is a challenge. There's things for people to do, there's new hardware to put in, there's systems to test, etc. But the sites that you fundamentally visit today will still be accessible, going forward.
Pete:
So really, these changes are only going to affect some of the newer sites coming on?
Richard:
That's probably the big area of concern where, if you connect without using IPv6, and maybe some services are only available on IPv6 and aren't available on IPv4, and you haven't transitioned to what they call "dual stack", you won't be able to access some particular services. So if you imagine a new flavour of Twitter coming online, or a new service like that coming online, and it was only available on IPv6, if you haven't made the transition, you wouldn't be able to access that service. All ISPs should be able to do stuff to make sure that people can connect to their services, and still enjoy them.
Pete:
Fingers crossed. Now, we mentioned in our April show that there's a website called test-ipv6.com, which lets you check out your browser and your Internet connection to see how ready you are for IPv6. Now, when I go to that site at the moment, I see a 0% readiness, which sounds a little bit worrying. Is that what I should expect at the moment, or should I be expecting more than zero?
Richard:
We've just started our transition and actually today, my network engineer, Carl, has actually connected to the site for the first time, and got 100% success just this morning, and it is just about the fact that ISPs and other Internet service providers will gradually over time move people over, and during the period you'll see that percentage just rise up. So actually the day before, we were only 80% ready, because we hadn't enabled our DNS servers, which is like the Internet's address book. So over time, absolutely - people will just start to see that percentage lift up.
Pete:
Oh, that's good news. When can we actually expect to start seeing IPv6 making an impact in the UK?
Richard:
In terms of impacting consumers, I don't think actually many consumers will see an impact, because we currently have IPv4. A lot of the services will remain on IPv4, and all those services you'll still get on IPv4 now. What you'll see is basically providers moving over to IPv6, and running it in this what they call this dual stack status. So you'll be assigned an IPv4 address, and an IPv6 address at the same time.
Pete:
It's obviously going to be a very busy time for you guys. What about the end user, though? - I'm thinking particularly of things like software patches for computers, and maybe fiddling around with routers to get IPv6 to work. As a home broadband user, is this going to be a hassle?
Richard:
It should be a fairly smooth process. The challenge for a lot of ISPs will be, if you've bought a very old router, that router might not have firmware which is capable of running IPv6. So there'll be challenges about people swapping over. But again, the ISP can do things to enable services for IPv6, so they can do something around translation. I think the biggest challenge for most customers will be around operating systems and so on. So OS X and Windows 7 all support IPv6, but some older operating systems in the Nineties don't support it, and during the transition people are going to have to upgrade and change their firmware, or upgrade their devices. So there's some issues around how successful, for example, Windows XP is with IPv6, and there's some pieces around that, that have to be done.
Pete:
Really? - Windows XP? I use Windows XP myself. Am I likely to have a problem then, with IPv6?
Richard:
At some point. I'm sure that we'll probably be down to a patching cycle and so on, but right now there's just some small challenges around how it integrates with a dual stack environment.
Pete:
OK, so it sounds like we've got some updating to do for our old Windows XP machine, and possibly our router as well. What about the mobile Internet, though? - when you come to a mobile handset or a smartphone, they're obviously a lot harder to update and add new components to. How is IPv6 going to affect the mobile Internet?
Richard:
Mobile Internet is an interesting one. 4G won't be affected, because they deploy it as standard, IPv6. The current phones, it's kind of harder to say. I doubt there's going to be much impact, because mobile operators use something called NAT, so they use Network Address Translation. So you're not actually given necessarily a public IP address, or a public IPv4 address; or there's something called Carrier-grade NAT, where they try and re-interpret it, and that's actually the solution that some ISPs will look at, in the short term as well, to help with the transition over to IPv6.
I don't think it's such a difficult issue for the mobile industry, because they already have such big challenges with the amount of devices that are out there already.
Pete:
Now, we had an interesting question in from one of our listeners. Given that we're going to be running v4 and v6 in parallel over the Internet, can we expect the Internet to slow down, as it has to handle these two different layers?
Richard:
I don't think it's anything to worry about. It will create certain challenges, but actually the IPv6 protocol is more efficient. So actually it should, as more and more users come online, it'll actually reduce it. There are some additional translations to do in terms of making a decision about where to go, but because of the fact that it is more efficient as a new standard, it should be good for consumers from that side of it.
Pete:
OK, that's reassuring. One other concern that's been brought to our attention is for people like ourselves that run websites. We run a fairly busy website, and we make a lot of use of various IPv4 addresses. So it's things like IP address blocking for our forum, various custom add-ons that we have that make use of IP addresses, and I know there's a number of websites out there that use IP geo filtering, so that people from certain regions get treated differently. Now, there's so many different bits of software out there that do rely on the old format of IP addresses. Is that going to be a concern, when we get to v6?
Richard:
I'll be honest - this is where the real challenge starts to come in, and I think this is the bit that is quite significant. A lot of providers will offer this dual stack service, so you shouldn't see any particular issue, but you will want to move your own services to IPv6 over a period of time, and that's a major change to how the Internet works. Where it becomes more of an issue is kind of some of the internals of the systems, because they might not be suitable for IPv6; a lot will be, but some won't be.
The big one actually is around things like functions around whitelisting addresses on corporate networks - there'll be these new services coming on; geofiltering, in terms of for rights holders using streaming services - they've got to consider those type of things, and less developed countries actually might be the first ones to take IPv6. They might go straight there, straight away, and actually avoid IPv4. There'll be a lot of challenges around how all that geo-type functionality is going to work. I think that's one of the reasons actually we're trying to trial it quite early.
Pete:
So how are things going as far as Plusnet's plans for IPv6? How far down the line are you?
Richard:
We've enabled all of our core network, all of our internal network for IPv6 over the last couple of months. We've enabled our transit, which is where we transit out to different providers on the Internet, and on IPv6 Day we'll be getting 25 of our customers to actually connect over IPv6 to our network and actually visit things like Facebook and Google and those providers that have got IPv6 servers already enabled, just to kind of showcase the fact that consumers shouldn't be too worried about it, but there is still a lot of things to do for the tech industry, and we want to also be part of that.
Pete:
Now you briefly mentioned World IPv6 Day, which, if I remember rightly, is taking place on 8th June. Now, is that a big milestone for Plusnet?
Richard:
I think it's going to be a great day for us, just in terms of, we'll have our first customers online. So it'll be the first chance that we'll get to see what customers see of IPv6, and hopefully they'll see nothing, and it'll all just work and it'll be fantastically seamless. If not, my interview here's going to be really, really horrible, because I've got it all wrong!
Pete:
Don't worry - we won't hold it against you. A couple of days ago, we put out a tweet to our listeners, to get them to send in some questions that we could pose to you. Now, we heard from Neil Tomlinson and Spencer Ralph, who were asking when they'd be getting faster broadband speeds where they live. Now, I'm assuming we're not going to go down that road. We also heard from Rob Dixon, who's one of our regular listeners. When we put out the tweet, we didn't actually say which Internet service provider we'd be talking to. This may sound like a set up, but I promise you this one's true - Rob says, "I've got no questions, but if it's Plusnet you're talking to, please congratulate them on their excellent customer service." How's that?
Richard:
That's very nice! It's great to hear - I always like to hear that from customers.
Pete:
We also heard from Robert Uprichard and Adrian Higginbotham. They got in touch to talk about the role that the ISP plays in broadband today. Obviously, there's been some challenges out there - things like the Digital Economy Act - the whole user piracy issue; super-injunctions - big news at the moment, of course; and all the issues around advertising broadband speeds. Now, obviously a challenging time for you as an Internet Service Provider. What would you say were the biggest challenges out there for you, at the moment?
Richard:
I think the biggest challenge remains for ISPs actually right now is video. I think video is a fantastic opportunity for consumers. We're starting to see a real shift in demand for catch-up TV services. You see Netflix now in the US dominating almost 30% of its Internet traffic. That is going to be a big capacity challenge, and it's something that all ISPs will be able to meet. But I still think there's so much more to run on video. I think video conferencing, you've seen Microsoft buy Skype, and I think there's some really interesting stuff there that's going to happen in terms of actually, is that going to just drive more video usage? Is FaceTime going to drive more video usage? Is it actually going to become adoptable? And then just how we access our entertainment services - all those things.
I think video's still got a long way to go. The problem for ISPs is just going to be the challenge of, can they keep up with the capacity. It's going to be fun, because actually all these great new services are going to come online, but the growth rates have been phenomenal over the last couple of years. It's just a challenge for every ISP to sit there, and kind of make sure they've got everything nailed down and sorted.
Pete:
Talking of challenges, I'd like to challenge you now, if I may. You've already mentioned that video's fast becoming big business online. Where would you see the Internet taking us in the next, let's say, five years?
Richard:
I think the interesting thing for me is whether or not Cloud Computing actually moves to another level, in terms of saying you've got all these great services you access on the Cloud. Do you really have a laptop anymore? - or actually is there a really massive significant pushback from it, and actually everybody says, no actually. There's lots of concerns about privacy on the Internet and so on, and whether or not we'll have this tipping point of people just saying, actually no - I'm happy to invest in everything in the cloud, I'm happy to have everything on Facebook and my life managed there, and then other people who just actually really get turned off by it, because it's kind of like, no actually, I really don't.
We see this almost two groups of people on the Internet, in terms of how they operate, saying actually, I'm totally into it, and others that are just still kind of saying, no actually, I'm going to just interact with straight services. I think that's going to be, it's really interesting to see that play out, but I do think you'll see people that basically just actually end up almost shying away from some of the cloud-based services, and others that will just literally dip in and out, and use it for the day-to-day activities that they find useful - buying their rail tickets, buying their shopping, etc, but not actually engaging on the other side of it, because of those kind of fundamental privacy issues.
Pete:
If it's OK, we'll give you a call in about five years, and see how right you were.
Richard:
Yeah, that'd be great.
Pete:
Now, I've got just one final question for you, and this is about one of Plusnet's more unique services. If I've got this right, you offer your customers something rather special overnight - have I got that right?
Richard:
Yeah. We offer unlimited overnight, from midnight to 8am. We don't put any restraints on any of our traffic, or any of the usage, so literally you can knock yourself out and download as much as you like, and that's even on our base tier products. On our Value product, you can get ten gig during the day up until midnight, and then from midnight to eight am, that works really well. If you're anything like me, with a couple of young children, that makes a handy CBeebies' iPlayer watching at 6 am, which doesn't count towards my usage, which is fantastic.
Pete:
Great tip - thanks very much for that, Fletch, and thanks very much for your time - good to find out what's really going on with IPv6, and also to find out what your predictions are for the future, and we will be checking in five years from now.
Richard:
Thank you very much, Pete.
Pete:
That was Richard Fletcher, who is the Chief Operating Officer at the Internet provider, Plusnet. For some more information on Plusnet, you can take a look at our website, www.frequencycast.co.uk/plusnet.html.
More on Plusnet:For more on Plusnet and to see if they're are available in your area, go to www.plus.net |
More information:
- IPv6 Explained
- Our IPv6 Feature from Show 62
- Plusnet Information
- Broadband Basics
- UK Broadband Advice
- Plusnet Industry Insight Session
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