My Vodafone home broadband has been working great 🎉 (CityFibre FTTP, West Yorkshire). Both IPv4 and IPv6 work fine, delivering the full promised 150 Mbps (symmetric) and fairly low latency too (12ms ping reported by fast.com).
Netflix streaming had been working great too (over either IPv4 or IPv6) until today, when Netflix started to refuse streaming with a pop up that reads: “You seem to be using a VPN or proxy. Please turn off any of these services and try again.”
But I am not using a VPN or proxy. Netflix thinks that I am, but I am not.
It only happens when IPv6 is enabled, so a temporary workaround is to disable IPv6 while watching Netflix — but obviously it should not be necessary. I welcome having IPv6 as it widens the reachable internet and makes it easier for me to reach my home server when I’m away. Disabling IPv6 will not be the solution. I’d rather stop watching Netflix than disabling IPv6! Also, for what it is worth, Netflix was working fine over IPv6 for weeks, until today.
To me it clearly looks like the fault is in Netflix’s VPN detection system (IP address prefix database and/or algorithm), however when I contacted Netflix’s customer services, they refused to acknowledge that it is their fault and insisted that I should contact Vodafone and ask Vodafone to fix it. In fact their FAQ states as much, publicly in writing, instructing the user to ask their ISP to contact Netflix’s customer services. That’s right: They want me to ask Vodafone to contact Netflix’s customer services so that Vodafone will work with Netflix directly to fix the problem.
I haven’t tried contacting Vodafone’s customer services 1-on-1 yet, but I expect customer services will be puzzled when I tell them that Netflix wants me to ask them to contact Netflix to fix a Netflix VPN detection issue. Has anyone here gone through this before?
Honestly, I find it arrogant of Netflix not to admit that their system has a problem and to expect the ISP to initiate the conversation with Netflix. And I find it poor form of Netflix to push the problem back to the user and expect the user to coordinate the action with the ISP. What do you think?
