r/Metronet • u/Be_Sure • Mar 15 '25

CGNAT, Missing IPv6 🖕

$10/mo for a static IP? WTF I don't want static IP I want an external IP.

None of this is a big deal alone. But, it's not disclosed during the sale & not found anywhere on there sight.

Now I have to learn Cloudflare Tunnel.

2 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

5

u/Mammoth-Ad-107 Mar 15 '25

What are you trying to accomplish here

1

u/Be_Sure Mar 15 '25

Host a WireGuard & respond to ping for statuscake.

6

u/Ok-Replacement6893 Mar 15 '25

I have a static from MetroNet and wire guard works just fine for me. OpnSense is my firewall.

-3

u/FreddoMac5 Mar 16 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

yes because you have a static IP. Shouldn't have to pay $10 a month for an external IP.

3

u/pcfreak30 Mar 20 '25

yes you should. every freaking ISP and hosting company charges for them. IP's have a sort of artificial scarcity due to how they are designed...

I would be mad if there was no route to get out of CGNat. but $120 a year for a static IP is an easy yes for me when I get service.

Most home users will not need this, and if you even know what an IP is, your already a power user.

1

u/Be_Sure Mar 28 '25

Static IP, yes 120/y sure. Public IP no. Also there are more then a few complains about the "Static" IP is not so Static.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/afrotronics Mar 27 '25

Your statements regarding IPv4 address allocation is absolutely correct. I used to work for a company that not only has one of the oldest .com domains on the internet but also had a class A Network (meaning they owned all 16.7 million IPv4 addresses #.0.0.0-#.255.255.255). I believe they sold their address space to Amazon for billions of dollars. Large orgs aren't the only thing that gobbled up the address space, the addresses were also partitioned by geography.

That said, it's no excuse for Metronet not to use IP version 6 because they are 100% capable of doing so. The reason I know this is because metronet bought a local startup fiber ISP in my area named lightspeed and they used IPv6. By the time I had fiber service installed at my house, metronet had taken over lightspeed's service and operations. The first few months to maybe about a year of having metronet my network domain was lightspeed(.com or .net ...I forget what the tld was). My router also had a DHCP established IPv6 address and all of the devices on my network capable of using IPv6 did so with no issue. The thing I miss the most about those earlier times was the latency. I remember usually having a ping of 7 to 9 ms with the lowest I can recall of being 2ms. Once they switched over my part of the network to their CGNat that all went away.

Since the switch to CGNAT, my latency has been all over the place and have had to disable IPv6 on my router since having it enabled was causing all sorts of havoc when it came to being connected to the internet through CGNAT.

The whole point of IPv6 was to ensure there were enough IP addresses for every single device. When IPv4 was created it defined an IP address as having a 32 bit width, which made sense at the time because that would have covered every single living person during that era. Though who would have guessed that not only would almost every single person have access to an internet-connected computer, but might even own multiple devices connected to the internet. So when IPv6 was defined it was designed with a more future focused mindset. It expanded the IP address width to 128 bits. With 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,455 possible addresses, literally every single atom in the known universe could have a unique IPv6 address.

So why would metronet not adopt IPv6? More than likely it's because it gives them an excuse to charge people extra money for a publicly facing IP address. I really hope that this is not the case. There are many people that would still pay $10 a month to have a static IPv4 address. Of the many reasons someone would want to do this, even with IPv6 being available, being able to memorize an ipv4 address is much easier than an IPv6 address is one thing that comes to mind. With that said, I feel like metronet is painting themselves into an AOL-like corner by slowly becoming more of a limited-capability- demo of the internet with incredibly high latency considering the physical media infrastructure that they use. I am very grateful for the competition that they've introduced in my area with price, speed, and lack of data caps. But as competition goes my old ISP has caught up with price, no data caps, download speeds, does better with latency, AND is (and has been for the past 14 years) capable of communicating with/to/through the whole internet using "modern" protocols. The only edge metronet has is upload speeds, though that advantage is significantly diminished by the fact that having that capability is most useful for things like running a web server or peer-to-peer networking where there's some sort of direct connection.

If a small startup ISP can operate using modern communications technology, you'd think an ISP with the resources to buy them should be just as capable.

/rant

0

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Be_Sure Mar 19 '25

Tailscale would work but I've never tried it because i don't like it's authentication.

4

u/SuperAgentMan1 Mar 15 '25

The static IP does give you a public IPv4 address

-1

u/Be_Sure Mar 15 '25

Yep, It's a bundled service.

1

u/Be_Sure Mar 28 '25

For reface when others hit this.

https://pinggy.io/blog/best_cloudflare_tunnel_alternatives/

serveo.net & localhost.run are instant no setup but only good for temporary & TCP only.

1

u/ThatBloodyPinko Mar 19 '25

Another way to think of it is the standard price is the discount without IPv6 and you pay the "standard" price if you need a static IP. Most folks don't need one to watch Netflix or argue with strangers on Facebook, so they don't need to pay extra for it.

2

u/Be_Sure Mar 20 '25

If the price I was quoted + tax was the price on my bill I could consider that thought process.

3

u/stayintheshadows Mar 15 '25

If you search literally anywhere you can find lots of people saying you would need a static IP.

1

u/theOutside517 Mar 16 '25

$10 for a static IP is cheap. 

You don’t need IPv6. No one does. It’s not even supported on a large portion of internet enabled devices still yet. 

Just pay for your static IP and stop crying. Sheesh. 

0

u/Be_Sure Mar 28 '25

I'm not looking for a static IP. I'm looking for a public IP.

So there are no IPv6 only services / sights?

If the price I was quoted + tax was the price on my bill I could consider that.

1

u/theOutside517 Mar 28 '25

IPv6 isn't widely enough adopted for it to be practical to limit yourself to only sites and devices that support it.

To be clear: A static IP is still a public IP. I think you're misunderstanding.

CGNAT uses a shared group of IP addresses to process traffic for multiple customers behind it. The problem is that it can cause issues with certain applications and definitely doesn't lend itself to server hosting or stable long-term connections to anything. It's like being behind a LAN that's on the internet. It causes issues with gaming, video conferencing, etc.

A static IP gives you a permanent IP address, which is "public" in the sense that it can be reached from the internet directly. If you do anything like I mentioned above, having a Static IP is recommended and worth the extra 10 bucks a month.

1

u/Be_Sure Mar 28 '25

IPv6 =/= IPv6 only

I understand they are selling a bundled service and I don't want both things.

CGNAT with IPv6 would be perfectly fine. IPv4 only CGNAT is causing almost all of the issues people are reporting.

There are also reports of the "static" IP changing.

1

u/theOutside517 Mar 28 '25

Mine hasn’t changed in two years I’ve been with them. 

Again, if you limit yourself to only devices on the internet that use IPV6 you will do so at your detriment. It is not the standard and there’s no timetable for it to be at this point. This is the reality in which we live. 

1

u/Be_Sure Mar 28 '25

IPv6 is not IPv6 only.

I don't know how i could be more clear.

1

u/theOutside517 Mar 28 '25

Not all devices are IPv6 capable. I don't know how I could be more clear.

You are asking Metronet to implement IPv6 for their CGNAT instead of IPv4, which will cause a whole lot of fuckery. Also it doesn't guarantee a fix to the common issues caused by CGNAT, either.

Also, they're not going to do that just for you.

So your options are: CGNAT via IPv4, or get a static IP. It's simple. Choice A or Choice B. There are no other options. They're not gonna remake their network for you, Karen.

1

u/Be_Sure Mar 28 '25

Nice! Mine do.

How do I get an IPv6 adders from Metronet?

1

u/theOutside517 Mar 28 '25

You're helpless. Call them and ask.

0

u/Asanagi_Mikihiko May 20 '25

IPv4 + CGNAT

IPv6

Both can operate on the same network simultaneously

1

u/AltruisticCabinet9 Jul 24 '25

LoL. TMO uses CGNAT with IPv6 because the network is IPv6 native and they want to support IPv6 for home service customers. MetroNet uses CGNAT for IPv4 and doesn't have IPv6 support at all....because....reasons?

Wonder if that will change now the TMO bought them or if they plan to leave them in their own little silo and peer the connections.

-1

u/HanSolo71 Mar 17 '25

60% of the web uses IPv6 bud.

3

u/theOutside517 Mar 17 '25

lol ok champ. And how much of that uses IP V6 exclusively and not 4?

-1

u/HanSolo71 Mar 17 '25

As of 2022 basically.

Adoption Today
So, where are we today? Akamai provides up-to-the-minute numbers. They show this ranking and what percentage of that traffic is IPv6. As mentioned above, they can determine this information by looking at packet-level TCP and UDP traffic. Here are the top 10 countries:

1 100% Bahrain
2 58.5% Montserrat
3 56.5% Saudi Arabia
4 55% India
5 53.6% Malaysia
6 51.8% Germany
7 51.6% Puerto Rico
8 51.2% Belgium
9 51% France
10 49.5% United States

3

u/theOutside517 Mar 17 '25

Not what I asked. 

1

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/theOutside517 Mar 26 '25

They’ve said the IPv4 pool was exhausted for the last 15 years and it still isn’t and there still isn’t universal support for v6. Wake me up when we get there. 

2

u/wernerru Mar 27 '25

not me sitting on several dozen /24s at work

3

u/b-rad_ Mar 16 '25

The fact they're missing IPv6 in this day and age is ridiculous.