Broken IPv6 service in Bakersfield with Spectrum

[YoRyan]

Okay, I've had enough.

In my corner of California, Spectrum deployed residential IPv6 a few years ago, which is great. But the implementation is completely broken.

It's like this: Your router receives and advertises a prefix, and your devices will SLAAC themselves IPv6 addresses, but IPv6 traffic will not actually get routed in or out. Pings to ipv6.google.com go unanswered and time out. Pings to ipv4.google.com, of course, work just fine.

Sometimes this affects a subset of devices in the household; sometimes it affects all of them. The only surefire fix is to request a new prefix from Spectrum or reboot the router. As far as the router is concerned, everything is working fine and it will never do this on its own.

Web browsers can usually handle a broken IPv6 stack okay, using Happy Eyeballs, but apps and other software cannot, and will time out trying to connect to an IPv6 backend. So websites and services that support IPv6 are actually getting punished.

I am seeing this issue across multiple households with Spectrum in my area, some of them using the ISP rental router. So clearly, we have an ISP-level misconfiguration here.

How would I even bring this issue to Spectrum's attention? If I call customer service, they'll just tell me to turn everything off and on again, which would technically work, but, well, doesn't solve the underlying issue.

So frustrating.

[K6USY]

Your only option is to call support and convince them to kick you up to level 2 support and then maybe level 3 support.

I noticed a routing issue inside of Comcast's network once and it took getting kicked up to level 3 support to find someone that knew what I was talking about and to put in a ticket with their NOC. 

[YoRyan]

So things got to the point where IPv6 had ceased working altogether, even after rebooting and factory resetting the ISP rental router. As per my initial observations, it was the worst kind of failure--the router would think it had IPv6 connectivity and advertise a prefix, but no routing would actually occur.

I finally decided to bypass this hunk of junk altogether and plug a laptop directly into the modem. Surprise! IPv6 worked right away. I guess it was a case of bad equipment. For the record, the unit is a Sagecom RAC2V1S issued and branded by Spectrum.

I've pitched replacing this thing several times to my roommate, but he won't agree to it, not even to save the $5 router rental fee on his bill. Fortunately, I already have a TP-Link Deco unit installed in the same room that was providing a transparent wireless bridge back to my own bedroom. So I've swapped around the Ethernet cables to make my Deco the master router and IPv6 has been rock solid for a whole day now.