Help me understand how Vodafone works.

[Anonymous]

This can't be right Shirley. 😀 I know Cloudfare is a great set of servers. I use it for my DNS, but it's not that good! 😂

This is not the only oddity. I don't know how Vodafone does its routing but I appear to be in London, not Coventry. For example Speedtest.net has Iomart Leicester as 89 miles away, which it is, at a push, from London. In reality, it is 20 miles from Coventry. All London servers appear to be only 1 mile away from my location, not the >90 miles one would have to drive down the M1.

This isn't a complaint. I am merely trying to understand Vodafone better. 

[Jayach]

Your picture hasn't been moderated yet, but to try to answer your queries generally.

Vodafone's IP addresses on the various database never tie up with your actual location. I have been all over the country  according to them, and even in Northern Ireland. I am currently said to be in Sheffield and am actually in south east Essex.

As far as I know Speedtest bases it's choice of Server on ping times, but it may also take IP location into consideration.

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@Anonymous wrote:

This isn't a complaint. I am merely trying to understand Vodafone better. 

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Aren't we all!

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that.  The moveable location of customer IPs is surely not through choice. In the ideal world ones IP would at least match the  nearest exchange or optical core. Does Vodafone have network issues that cause problems, forcing rerouting?

Can I assume also, that our IP address is dynamic? I don't suppose it matters given I no longer  run a VPN server, I have to use Vodafone's router, to access the landline.  Sadly, my GT-AX11000 doesn't have phone ports. 

The default test server for me is Vodafone Watford, which gives me a ping of 11ms. The unmoderated image shows a speedtest using Cloudflare. Latency shows as only 8ms. 😁  , but  upstream was 1278.20 Mbps, hence my mirth. This is, of course, impossible, because the config caps the connection at 1Gbps. 

BTW If this forum insists on moderating images, why don't they have enough moderators to allow quicker approval? Perhaps they should moderate reactively. 

[CrimsonLiar]

All Vodafone's UK IPv4 addresses are pooled, so detail beyond them being in the UK is meaningless.  Why?  In part due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses.  Normally though when you connect to a data centre, that at least is correctly identified and located.

When it comes to the data centres, some of these are Vodafone owned, and some are virtual.  So for those of us who connect to the Manchester (Salford) datacentre, it would appear that the Cloudflare DNS servers are in the very same building as the Vodafone DNS servers, and in my case as the Google Stadia game servers!

That's kinda how it works!

[Anonymous]

Bring on IPV6 then. VF's  router is capable of handling it. 

[Jayach]

It's not the router, it's the network.

[Anonymous]

IPV6  has been a thing for a long time now, but I guess it requires every outfit in an interdependent system to climb on board. Are there any ISPs using IPV6? 

[CrimsonLiar]

Vodafone is known to be working towards IPv6!  What we'll probably get initially is a Dual-Stack system where we continue to receive a single IPv4 address, but are allocated a range of IPv6 addresses in addition.  The whole idea is that it is completely transparent to the average end-user!

Vodafone's current DNS servers are capable of serving IPv6 targets over IPv4, and in conjunction with the Teredo service, they have implemented users should have no problems accessing any IPv6 sites on the internet.

*DNS servers only provide an endpoint/target, the path data takes is managed by routing servers.  In most cases that path stays the same irrespective of whether the data is addressed using IPv4 or IPv6.

**You can always try IPv6 tunnelled over IPv4 by using a service such as https://tunnelbroker.net

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the explanation and the link to Tunnel Broker. Is that a free service and would the use of it affect personal web experience positively or negatively? 

[CrimsonLiar]

Tunnel Broker is free, but it can suffer from Geolocation issues.  Tunnel Broker themselves do update the Geolocation databases they have access to, but there can be a delay, or mismatches due to the re-provisioning of v6 IPs that have previously been used.

Example:

I have both IPv6/64 and IPv6/48 addresses available.  Despite my location with tunnelbroker being set as the UK the /64 IPs geolocate to the USA and the /48 IPs geolocate to Australia.  This causes problems with sites that both use a combination of IPv4 and IPv6 along with sites that overzealously region check.  So sites such as the BBC iPlayer require some work to get them to confirm I'm in the UK; and sites/apps from Meta such as Facebook and Instagram just refuse to work properly.

Oh, and thinking this is a great way to make your connection look like you are in the USA?  Not a good idea unless you want to break a whole load more sites and introduce tons of lag!

So it works and it's pretty stable with some issues, but unless you have a specialist need to avoid local NAT it provides little to no benefit, yet!