Upgraded to BT Business FTTP - lost all IPV6 connectivity

[orion_pilot]

Moving from BT FTTP residential to BT FTTP Business should have been a seamless and painless journey.

On my residential service, I had perfect dynamic IPV4 and a fully working IPV6 stack.  For various work related reasons, having a fixed IP address made a lot of sense, so I opted to 'upgrade' from Residential to Business in order to leverage the Fixed IP address in the enhanced 900 service.

Well, you can guess what happened?

BT instantiated the BT Business profile as expected on the planned date.

Tick > fixed IPV4 address - works
FAIL > IPV6 - disabled by BT

I opened a ticket immediately, only to have it closed as resolved 3 times by different team members, with absolutely no update on status, and no working IPV6 stack.

I re-opened a new fault ticket, only to find that I had to spend an hour on the phone with a tier1 helpdesk rep who didn't understand the problem.

Why is BT still provisioning fixed IP services to business customers and totally ignoring the fact that IPV6 is absolutely required in a business context?  Why do the BT frontline helpdesk staff have no idea what IPV6 is?  Why do BT frontline staff have absolutely no idea what to do with the problem, or who to speak to, or what needs to be done to resolve the problem?

I have searched these forums and found lots of instances of the same problem happening, so surely over the last few years BT Business will have become more accustomed to business customers ABSOLUTELY requiring IPV6.  My business lost productivity days as a result of FTTP being implemented without its IPV6 stack enabled for a business user.  Many of our core services are rendered over IPV6 and without it we are dead in the water.

Also, why can I not describe the issue in a fault report?  If logged in to the BT business portal and can see the faults, but I cannot comment on them, I cannot provide the relevant technical logs, and I cannot reopen a ticket that was closed by someone in BT when the matter has actually not been resolved?

IPV6 is here to stay.  The planet has already run out of IPV4 allocations.  It is unfathomable to me that BT would enable BT business fibre and do so by stripping out the IPV6 elements which already work well for residential customers.

Just in case it helps the MOD's on the community in the interim. 

• I did receive a broadband service ID when the order was completed.  This is an arbitrary number starting 06
• I received no instructions with respect to updating the default business PPPOE username or password, which remains set at the default of  btbusinesshub @ business.btclick.com - if a customised username and password is required why was it not sent to me during onboarding or on completion of the service activation?
• If I update the broadband username to the old residential settings of bthomehub @ btbroadband.com?  Guess what? I lose the IPV4 fixed IP address in favour of a dynamic one, and I do get a IPV6 Global Unicast Address, a ULA prefix /64 but IPV6 Network Status remains fixed on "Disabled".  But, it shows some hints that the errors on my business broadband are potentially related to the fact that the router is simply using its default btbusinesshub @ business.btclick.com identity?  Perhaps part of the process to send me a bt business broadband username and password for the actual PPPOE link has failed to be sent to me?

For now, I'm leaving the Hub set to default credentials because at least that way I do receive my allocated fixed IPV4 address and I'll just have to lose another business day tomorrow with no IPV6 connectivity until the business support team manage to get to the bottom of why my service is not working.

[orion_pilot]

Some progress made today. The backend team has updated the profile on my account and now, at last, I get a proper IPV6 prefix and in the correct range, the big issue remains that there is no route to the internet for my WAN connection on the BT side.  So, at least IPV6 is now enabled on the service, but it has no route to the internet.  1 step forwards though.  I have once again reset everything to 'a residential' service profile so that I have a working IPv6 stack.  But, we are one step closer to a result here!

[orion_pilot]

Another update for those of you following this thread.  BT technical team members have replicated the issue I have been reporting and they have observed a misconfiguration on the core network.  To remedy the problem, they will remove and then re-assign the fixed IP address configuration associated with my business account, and this should remedy the issue moving forwards with working gateways and routes for both IPV4 and IPV6.  

If you ever face a similar fault, simply leave your connection username as 'bthomehub@btbroadband.com' with password of 'BT' and enjoy a working IPv4 and IPv6 stack, albeit with dynamically assigned address and ipv6/64 prefix.  I actually found it makes no difference if you use a BT Home Hub (residential), BT Smart Hub 3 or Smart Hub 1; they all behave identically.

You should also make sure, when you sign up for Business Fibre, that you contact the BT business support team and ask for your BT Business username and password for CHAP authenication to the network.  BT never supplied this to me as a business user when I signed up, nor was it included in any of the order update processes, so you will need to approach them to ask for it.  

So, finally close to the end of this journey.  I'll do one final update when the business fixed IP address and ipv6/64 prefix have been re-engineered and hopefully that will conclude this challenge to a good resolution.

[orion_pilot · Accepted solution]

#YAY
And, we are finally there!  Thanks to the folks on this forum, the BT helpdesk team, the escalations team, BethM and a lot of log-tracing, plus the valiant efforts of some BT techies who replicated the issues, we are NOW GOOD TO GO!

• We have a static IPv4 address
• We have a fixed IPv6/56 prefix
• My LAN works in dual stack and is very happy
• My WAN works in dual stack and is preferring IPv6 when its available (as its quicker and packets are bigger!)

IPv6 Tests all pass with flying colours....

Testing even completes the most arduous of functions, including large packets....

and, finally, a production public website that runs in both IPv4 and IPv6 natively, and some 3rd party integrations to see if dual stack works correctly in the browser.....

 Again, thanks to the BT team who perceviered with me to get to the bottom of the problem, replicate it, and resolve it.

For those that may be interested, I don't use the BT supplied business hub (1 or 3), using a dedicated 3.4ghz 8 core PC as the router.  We run with a version of pfSense + firewall, router and based on openBSD, although I did use BT supplied Hub in triage, testing and validation of expected and actual results to remove 'variables', for example, a misconfiguration of the router from the equation.  As soon as the config worked on the BT hub we plugged our own, 'more powerful' router and it works identically, just with more muscle and configurability.

pfSense/opnSense (or other 3rd party router) Setup for BT Business Fibre 900

• LAN - IPv4 Configuration Type = static IPv4
• LAN - IPv6 Configuration Type = Track Interface (WAN,  IPv6 Prefix ID of 1)
• WAN - IPv4 Configuration Type = PPPoE (using assigned account username and password from BT)
• WAN - IPv6 Configuration Type = DHCP6
• WAN - MTU - Set to 1500
• Set - Use IPv4 Connectivity as parent interface is TRUE
• Set - Request only an IPv6 prefix is TRUE
• DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation size is set to 56
• LAN DHCP is enabled
• LAN DHCPv6 is enabled, but set Router Advertisement is set to STATELESS DHCP - as this way, Android phones are happy on the network with IPv6 too

So, that concludes this thread, resolved, with a fully working BT Business Fibre service. 

[BethM]

Hi orion_pilot

Thank you for updating us, glad to hear it's now working!