No public IP for EPT LuxFibre
EPT has officially launched the LuxFibre service beginning of September, although there are rumors that some friendly test customers had LuxFibre installation in service prior to September 2011.
Some LuxFibre users already reported that the standard LuxFibre service (no optional serviced booked) does not provide a public IP address on WAN interface. EPT assigns a private IP address by default, so the user’s Internet access will be subject to NAT44 (aka double IPv4 NAT). NAT44 breaks all kind of services mostly those which already have difficulties with single/simple NAT. EPT optionally assigns a dynamic and public IP address to the WAN interface of your router. This will allow Internet access with single/simple NAT, however at the cost of 1,99 EUR / month (http://www.pt.lu/portal/lang/en/telecom/pid/4061).
Some may say it’s time for IPv6, a service available from EPT free of charge as an OPT-IN service (http://www.pt.lu/portal/lang/en/telecom/pid/3998).
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Currently only Visual Online and TANGO publish any kind of information, none of them has published an optional service and price for a public dynamic IP. Nonetheless this may mean 2 things: 1) they only offer a private IP and don’t offer an optional public IP, 2) they offer a public IP to each an every access.
Luxembourg Online has announced a FTTH based service but it seems they haven’t published any prices.
VDSL30 uses the same backbone and concept as the FTTH service (at least within the EPT infrastructure). It seems that currently only VO makes use of VDSL30 to provide VOFiber service to areas without FTTH coverage.
The immediate consequence of a private IP address on the WAN interace is double NAT. This in turn mostly causes issues with applications and protocols which use several flows. This could be FTP, any kind of voice and/or video chat, most multi player (over the Internet) games and many many more. In these cases the double NAT usually blocks packets from the Internet to the user, as the carrier’s NAT is unaware of the protocol/application used and cannot act proactively. Also UPnP doesn’t have an effect on the carrier’s NAT, it only affects the NAT on the modem/router.
Additionally there might be address collisions with regular services. Such a situation may happen with services which have been optimized for scalability and high-availability (today these services are usually called “cloud” services), as the service operator uses NAT in his infrastructure to provide a given service (e.g. SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP, …) from a single public IP. This can happen with single NAT as well, however the probability is much lower, as a typical home network usually uses no more than a maximum of 256 private IP addresses. A Carrier Grade NAT usually uses a network which is much larger in order to avoid an address shortage in the future.
I have got reports of LuxFibre users which have issues connecting to their company’s SMTP server because of address collision.
BTW, you should not run any kind of eMail services on a dynamic IP address, chances are huge (if not 100%) that your outgoing mails get black-holed, rejected etc because the IP addresses are known as dynamic IP addresses for internet access. Use a dedicated IP address for such kind of services.
@Marc: You should look into “email relaying” (SMARTHOST in sendmail). You can run an email server just fine on a dynamic address, provided you have a dynamic DNS service and that your outgoing email is relayed through a “real” email server (typically your ISP’s smtp will be just fine). Incoming mail is delivered to any IP address, regardless whether it is dynamic or static.
Frankly… The only thing I really want is an ethernet jack and plug my Soekris net5501-70 which then gets a IPv4 public address by some way (DHCP probably), but static would just be fine too. Operating system, routing, firewalling, are all my own business how I do it.
Never had it happen to me… Also, last time I tried, gmail actually accepts mails coming from Dynamic IPs. They have that much faith in their spam filters. Besides, back when the Internet was not invaded by the common man, it was perfectly acceptable to run your own mailserver. How I miss those days. The true peer-to-peer nature of the Internet. All that is lost…. *sigh*
DHCP is fine… if I get a public IPv4 and I can use my own router. A said, a Ethernet jack would be more than enough for me and cost less, after all you pay for their crappy routers. It was already a bitch to get a router that could do bridge mode when my ADSL modem from 2003 stopped working. It simply stopped working, probably due to an upgrade somewhere. When I tested it on my fathers line, it worked perfectly fine, so it wasn’t the modem. After that they gave me a FritzBox (forgot the model) and the damned thing wouldn’t go in bridge mode at all. The option was there, but it resulted in a restart into the Wizard. I finally gave up with that crap and got myself the cheapest Thompson ADSL2+ router I could get, and where bridge mode did work.
Anyway, I’ll best wait till next year for LuxFibre (actually VOFibre as I’m with them) because I’ll be moving and I sure as hell am not going to pay for an installation of the connection twice. 
Technically you will get an Ethernet plug, altought I have no idea (yet) which limitation/restrictions may have been added by the different Service Providers. Once I have tried things myself or got some reliable reports I will of course publish them here, so it’s a good idea to subscribe my RSS feed, Twitter, etc 
Hello Marc,
Currently, I have a luxdsl connection with a thompson 536v6 router in bridge mode, the 536 is connected via ethernet port to my main router (running OpenBSD), pppoe authentication is done via my openbsd router with the pppoe client.
I have a new house where the ept fiber comes into my home. I assume that if I switch to luxfiber the dsl router is obsolete. I have a question regarding the ept ftth connection.
I don’t want any fritz box, EPT recommends a fritzbox 7550 or 7350 (I can’t remember the exact model right now …anyway), I had a look at those manuals, they (only) have 1 DSL/VDSL connection, 4 lans and 1 or 2 phone lines … As mentionned previously, in any case, I would like to keep my BSD router. Do you know what my custom router has to be able to do to connect to the luxfiber ip network. My router has a few 1GB ethernet adapters, is that enough or do you need to setup some authentication or encapsulation protocols, if so … what are these … do you if there is some documentation at the ept site as I was not able to find any doc
thank you very very much!!!
didier
As previously mentioned the ATH/FTTH provides a physical copper (Gigabit-)Ethernet plug. Unfortunately I have no information about eventual restrictions and/or limitations applied to the service which could limit the choice of hardware. This does not mean that there are no such restrictions/limitations.
NB, the Fritz!Box models 7570 and 7390 (as all other Fritz!Box models) can be configured to use 1 of the 4 (Gigabit-) Ethernet interfaces as WAN interface.
The Annex A & B are ADSL* features, VDSL used profiles, the Fritz!Box chipsets (as far as I can tell) usually support all of them. All recent international Fritz!Box models do have multi Annex support for ADSL. Unfortunately I didn’t have the possibility (yet) to compare the 7570 to the 7390 in practice, however the chipsets used in the 7390 are newer and probably better.
The 7390 has 4 1Gb/s Ethernet interfaces and a 450Mb/s WLAN 802.11n chipset, the 7570 (only) has 4 100Mb/s Ethernet interface and a 300 Mb/s WLAN 802.11n chipset. The 7390 can operate WLAN on 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz simultaneously and concurrently, the CPU is 200 MHz faster and the RAM has double the size.
The ADSL*/VDSL is also different, but I don’t have more detailed info.
I’ll test a 7390 on ADSL2+ Annex B in the next few weeks and I will try to post the results here.
for the archive …
I found this very interesting pdf, actually it answers all my questions (especially ATH/FTTH, point 4).
They use layer2 vlan tagging (VLAN 35 is internet traffic, VLAN 39 is voice). The fiber is connected via converter (which is in the ept BOX in my new home) to the ethernet port (which does pppoe).
EPT usus Q-in-Q in their backbone, so the VLANs presented to the CPE will probably be the same for every wholesale OAO (other alternative operator). OTOH Mono-VC/Mono-VLAN setups have been discussed as well, so while the VLANs themselves might not differ, their number still could differ.
This would be inline with the the ATM VCI/VPI settings ofr ADSL based services. Of course OAOs which make use of unbundling, might use their own VCI/VPI or VLAN settings, however for FTTH this is not yet available.
Using a common VCI/VPI or VLAN on the CPE side for all the users of the wholesale ADSL/VDSL/FTTH will also make debugging much easier.
I should have more insight into the whole setup by october, I will post them here.
Tatsächlich praktizieren viele ISPs diese Methode um zu verhindern dass infizierte Computer ihrer Benutzer SPAM über Open-Relay SMTP Server versenden (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offenes_Mail-Relay). Deshalb implementieren immer mehr eMail Anbieter einen 2. SMTP Port, öfters Mail Submission Port genannt (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol) welcher unter der Port Nummer 587 erreichbar ist. Moderne SMTP Server unterstützen den Port 587 standardmässig. Google hat sehr gute Erklärungen zur Konfiguration einzelner eMail Clients veröffentlicht, in der Regel sind diese kompatibel zu anderen eMail Anbietern, die Servernamen müssen natürlich angepasst werden (https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13287).
Unfortunately VPN access isn’t working neither with the double NAT configuration. That’s not a matter of double NAT as it’s working on mobile phones (using the same translation).
Regarding the speeds, unfortunately due to very bad wiring (Cat3), I have 9 down, 8 up (of 30/10 in theory and having a ONU in the building). Rewiring the accommodation from 4th floor to the basement is related bigger investments because of the fire protection in the shafts.
Does VO give a public IP address with VOFiber? And what about Luxembourg Online? And is this the same for VDSL30 (which they also call fiver although it’s copper)?