A few days ago the world celebrated IPv6 day. Yeah!

Following the excitement of the moment I decided to contact my current Internet provider Netvigator about their support for IPv6. And the reply I received 2 days after my inquiry was quite surprising.

Now you would assume that the simple question “Do you support IPv6?” would trigger the answer to be either “yes” or “no”, but for some reason Netvigator TechSupport decided this would be too boring and sent me on a quest to find out for myself, by “inviting me to refer to their website for announcement”, as they put it.

So, being a good, little customer, I did just that. And guess what… The website doesn’t say anything about IPv6… No announcement, no entry in the FAQ and nothing mentioned in the list of available plans.

Now the following questions arise:

  • Did they just send me a standard reply to get rid of me?
  • Do they not support IPv6 but don’t want to talk about it and instead send people who ask about it on a pointless journey hoping these people may think they themselves are just too stupid to find the information?

and of course

  • Do they or do they not (again, yes or no question) support IPv6?

Because my question has not been answered I decided to reply to their email. I repeated my question and pointed out that answering this simple yes or no question would have certainly helped to save everybody’s time.
One thing I actually did manage to find out is that they operate the site http://ipv6.netvigator.com, which, as is to be expected, is only available through IPv6. So, generally speaking, they do have IPv6, but of course that is not my question. What I do want to know is if IPv6 is available to customers like me.

At this point I just want to mention that this is not some angry rant. I am actually pretty happy with Netvigator and their service. The Internet connection works great, delivers the speed I pay for and customer service usually is friendly and helpful.
Sure, there are things that could use improvement, like their horribly stupid web bill that always resizes my browser window (why do they think they know better than I what size my browser windows should be?) or the fact that they block access to any SMTP server but their own (unless you can use SMTPS, because they only block port 25, but not 465).
Sure, the latter can be circumvented by using webmail, and nowadays many people do anyway, but tell you what: I don’t like webmail. Why? Because I have an email client on my computer and it does things way better than some stupid website ever can.

But back to IPv6. Now why is this so important to me? Especially considering that the router I have at home doesn’t even support IPv6? Because I do want to know that my ISP is capable of adjusting to the changing landscape of the Internet. IPv6 will soon become more and more important, now that we’re out of IPv4 addresses. Completely leaving aside the fact that IPv6 has been around for quite some time and enjoyed a whole lot of ignorance from most of the world. Probably because there’s NAT that solves all problems this world knows, including cancer, HIV and broken fingernails…

So at this point I am waiting for another reply, which possibly is going to take another 2 days. But since it’s weekend now I’ll be nice and give them time until Wednesday, at which point I will give their support hotline a call.

Again, I don’t understand why it is so hard to find out about this. Their website seems to either not talk about IPv6 at all or efficiently hides it from interested (potential) customers and their email support refers me to said website, instead of simply giving me the information I asked for.
I can nearly imagine somebody sitting there waving his hand at my email saying “This is not the information you are looking for.”

So, all this said, I will wait now, hoping that soon I will receive an email either giving me a proper answer or pointing me to the right place to look for the information I want.

Thank you!
Dennis Wronka