Can’t access BBC iPlayer or use eBay?

In a discussion on our forums, some users have noted problems with their Hey Broadband connections not working when accessing some websites such as BBC iPlayer or auction/selling platform eBay, among other problems connecting to different online services. We thought we would go through why these kinds of things can happen and what you can do about it. Before we go into the explanation, it’s important to note this issue is not isolated to a single provider.

Background — The roots of the issues appear to be a shortage of IPv4 addresses, the numbers like 123.123.123.123 that you sometimes see that identify each server or endpoint on the Internet. As each of these four octets can be a number from 0 to 255, the maximum number of addresses us 255^4 which means there are 4,228,250,625 IPv4 addresses. The reality is a bit more complex as there are ‘private’ ranges, multicast and so on, but let’s just say there are 4 billion IPv4 addresses. Now you might think that is a lot, but historically every computer and device connected to the Internet might need one. We’ve long used technologies such as NAT (Network Address Translation) which has reduced the number of IPs each broadband user needs to just one, which is shared between all the devices in their home. We have since seen even more sharing (also common with mobile networks; your mobile phone will always have shared their IP) called CGNAT or “Carrier Grade” NAT which means you share the IP address with many other users. This has a significant downside, namely that if you were to say get banned from a forum, you could also be affecting other users on the same IP.

In the past few years, there have been no more IP addresses available from the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) such as RIPE NCC in Europe. This means, a new provider, or one that is expanding will need to buy or lease IPs from companies who have excess addresses.

The problem — Providers who are sourcing IP addresses from IP exchanges or leasing companies are able to give you connectivity, maybe even an IP address not shared wth others. If you were to start a broadband provider today, you will need to buy or lease IPv4 addresses, and they are anywhere around $40/IP to buy. Leasing/renting prices are more variable, but Zen Internet are offering these to other companies on short term contracts for £0.50/IP/month.

If you were to source the IPs from someone like Zen, you probably wouldn’t have the problem experienced by some users here, but the market for IPs is quite international and in this case the provider in question has sourced some IPs from a provider called IPXO. The RIPE NCC Whois details suggested these are based in Australia, but some old geo-IP databases (companies that specialise in locating where an IP is in the world) have located them to countries which we might say eBay would not wish to serve.

Similarly BBC iPlayer, Netflix and other companies dealing with streaming content have rights limited to specific regions or countries, and therefore have to use these Geo-IP providers to verify that the user is within the allowed jurisdiction, such as the U.K. Since sale or rental of IPs happens without Geo-IP providers knowing, it’s therefore possible for these databases to become out-of-date and thus deny access to key services.

How to fix it — If you are seeing issues accessing the internet, then you need to raise this with your broadband service provider. Whilst it’s not their ‘fault’ that the issue has occurred, it is up to them to fix it, either by finding another IP address for you to use (which is what Hey broadband appear to have possibly done since the issues were resolved), or the they can contact the various Geo-IP providers to request their databases be updated; however, this process can be somewhat time consuming, so you want a workaround as a user.

The solution — It might be that some websites work just fine even though there are problems with the geo-location of IPv4 addresses, but that’s because some sites may run over IPv6 and there is no shortage of v6 addresses, so these are directly allocated to the provider in question by RIPE NCC, and also presents the real solution to this problem, however we have been talking about IPv6 readiness for the past twenty years. You will find yourself on IPv6 without even realising at times, but it’s still not possible to rely on IPv6 alone on today’s Internet.