Have we reached a saturation point for broadband speeds in India?

[Lolita_Magnum]

You say PPPoE is old and not the answer; then what do you recommend for these "small ISPs"?

 

[markiv]

Shall we connect seperately on that, and newer alternative is already deployed by Jio at scale but it is not using dhcpv6-pd at all or just using it as SLAAC. There has to be middle ground between resedential broadband and lease like which can be autoconfigured even with bridge ONT(receive IP in DHCP) with larger prefix like /60 or /56 on ipv6. Smaller and medium isp use slaac which can allocate /64 prefix in auto mode and lease line requires manual configuration and allocation.

 

[thatayush]

SLAAC is practically only as old as IPv6. Architectural challenges of running a business cannot be mixed with new implementations breaking (most) ISPs since most of the junk is from "trained" NOC operators who have learnt their habits from working with IPv4. This is my opinion in general after seeing how home internet has been served since a while, for ex - Airtel has had auto-config on the routers since VDSL became a thing while BSNL in 2026 cannot do auto-config and requires the local team to request credentials from the SDEs to setup routers.

Also you have misunderstood how IPv6 is assigned: Router Advertisements (RA) are sent after PPPoE authentication is completed with info that v6 exists and here is the link next hop (to use as gateway). Then DHCPv6 PD mechanism is used to get prefix info. SLAAC's only job is on the local LAN.

SLAAC addresses are used by Android since they refuse to implement dhcpv6 support while the latter is required for Apple devices.

 

[thatayush]

Any cellular service uses a completely different mechanism so this does not matter, and Jio Fiber also uses DHCPv6 PD to hand out addresses. SLAAC is only used by the Jio Router to assign v6 locally from the prefix.

 

[markiv]

I was talking about jio fiber only. Larger and mid tier ISP deploy both dhcpv6-pd and SLAAC to be future ready
But smaller ISPs only rely on SLAAC for automation which most of the times is configured by 3rd party. Their router uses slaac so mostly it is not capable to handle larger prefix sizes like /60 or /56 in ipv6

 

[markiv]

Auto configuration on airtel is because of ont auto configuration boxes not BNG apart from ont update push and control, whereas jio needs autoconfiguration box to just to push updates and change something at your end

 

[thatayush]

But smaller ISPs only rely on SLAAC for automation which most of the times is configured by 3rd party. Their router uses slaac so mostly it is not capable to handle larger prefix sizes like /60 or /56 in ipv6

This is not fully correct, SLAAC is only 1 component. The routers are still using DHCPv6-PD so Apple devices can get v6 addresses. The only reason that makes sense why we don't get anything besides /64 is because IPv4 is over-utilised and needs NAT everywhere so they don't want to run out of v6 to use. Any router is capable of getting assigned larger prefixes, create the 1st /64 and use that for LAN without issue (except if the router and/or firmware is 10 years old then I will have doubts).

Yes v6 is practically infinite, yes ISPs usually get a /32 or /29 prefix, yes their concern is invalid, but again the same problem: habits are habits.

 

[thatayush]

You can try running openwrt or either of pfsense or opensense and test this yourself. Dynamic v6 end-to-end does not work without dhcpv6 - pd.

 

[markiv]

small ISP: less than 10cr turnover are on generally on slaac (both Slaac and dhcpv6-pd are configured with OEM support brought in by 3rd party system integrator)
medium ISP 20-500cr (both Slaac and dhcpv6-pd are configured with OEM support and inhouse integration and NOC support)
Tier A ISP probably deployed without direct OEM support

my ISP had deployed ipv6 only on SLAAC (3rd party system integrator who claims to be serving 10lac users accross muntiple ISPs)