IPv6 gets a mention in lots of threads. Many of the recent ones are already locked (the Bing data, photogrammetry ones, for example) and others are almost a year old.
My problem is very recent and my question is how much do I need IPv6 to run MSFS??? Maybe a moderator can decide if there is a better home for this inquiry rather than me starting a new thread.
I recently switched to Windows 11 and with the switch my Office 365 Outlook Exchange Server account became very finicky connecting until yesterday, Outlook would freeze at the splash screen on launch and not even launch in Safe Mode. Diagnosis with Microsoft’s Support and Recovery Assistant (SARA) said my problem was I had no IPv6 connectivity and that I should disable IPv6 connectivity in networking to restore MS 365 Outlook functionality. Since that seemed pretty extreme, I found another MS support article that recommended a REGEDIT to prefer IPv4 over IPv6, which I did. After this regedit (didn’t check before), an IPv6 Internet test says that I have zero IPv6 connectivity with my computer, router, and Charter Spectrum service. But just as SARA instructed, MS 365 Outlook now launches and runs with a great server connection with the PREFER IPV4 OVER IPV6 registry setting. A test from a Windows 10 computer with no regedit also shows no IPv6 connectivity although Spectrum cable service says they provide IPv6 addressing but since they’re just part of the Internet chain can’t guarantee that connectivity all the way to any server.
So is lack of IPV6 functionality is going to be a problem for me with MSFS 2020 or other PC gaming somewhere down the line? Didn’t seem to affect either MSFS running in 2D or VR for an hour or two last night even when Outlook wouldn’t work at all. Perhaps it’s time for a new router but it would be nice to have a test to see if it’s the router per se that’s the source of my IPv6 problem. Any suggestions, too, on how to find the source of the IPv6 connectivity problem?
IPv6 should have taken over as the standard at least a decade ago IMHO, but the way things are moving, I would be surprised if it has gained much traction (say >25%) for regular home internet connections 10 years from now.
Less than a third of the top 1000 sites are reachable via IPv6; the rest require IPv4. (The 30% capable of IPv6 are also capable of IPv4 and will be for a long time.)
The vast majority of home connections don’t offer IPv6 yet, so most likely the connectivity test you ran is entirely correct.
You’re perfectly fine without it as far as MSFS is concerned, several years from now as well.
The reason you’ve had those issues is most likely that Windows or some component thought you have IPv6 access and tried to use it, but since you don’t, all connections will fail.
Thanks for the info. That’s reassuring. I found a good LifeWire article that said IPv6 issues can sometimes be caused by the router or modem needing a reboot but that didn’t do it for me, either. How to Fix an IPv6 No Network Access Error (lifewire.com). I’ll have to see what I can come up with to test the current IPv6 functionality of my router “in house” to see, cable network or not, whether the router itself still has its advertised IPv6 functionality. Edit_Update: Looks like the following article might be a good place for me to start - IPv6 Command line Testing & Troubleshooting in Windows (computernetworkingnotes.com)
As an even earlier step, you should check if your ISP offers IPv6 to begin with.
There are ways to get access even if they don’t, but there aren’t really any advantages for the average person. I did that 15 years ago as a tech nerd, but aside from the geek factor, it had mostly downsides (such as lower performance and increased latency from having to send all the traffic to another site for “repackaging” to IPv6).
To be clear though, IPv6 itself doesn’t have those downsides – that’s only if your ISP doesn’t offer it, and most don’t.
You dont need ipv6 to run msfs. I have it turned off on the router, on the win10 machine, on the linux machines, well you get the point. Everything runs flawlessly with this setup here.
@Aeluwas. I have checked twice with Charter’s Spectrum cable service 1/2 year apart. I have 3 Harman-Kardon Invokes and Microsoft with Harman converted all such devices to pure BT speakers when Cortana was retired as a general standalone, general purpose speaker device. Must have been the only person in the world but I couldn’t get the OTA firmware update that would flash my devices overnight to pure BT speaker status (but at the suggestion of Harman support, it worked right away via a cellular data connection with the Invokes connected to my smartphone as a mobile hotspot!). Back then it occurred to me that perhaps failure of the OTA updates via cable might somehow be an IPv6 connectivity problem but the Spectrum support person said then that they provide IPv6 connectivity as did another Spectrum support person avowed in the early AM today when I inquired again if there was anything wrong in Spectrum’s IPv6 functionality. Thanks for your great help and advice. I also have a factory-fresh Netgear router from 2014 never used - warranty replaced previous failed Netgear - that has IPv6 support and my neighbor, who is a super medical records database geek, shares the same Spectrum cable box with me so I’ll try swapping out the router and asking the neighbor if he also lacks IPv6 connectivity to further see what’s transpiring. Just a challenging puzzle to solve!
LOL Spectrum theres your problem right there Hahaha. I have them as well, called a few weeks ago about speed issues, they said nope everything is fine, so I went out and bought a broadcom based modem to bypass their â– â– â– â– â– â– one, and 3 days after I got the modem up and running I got an email from them telling me they fixed my connection. LOL
BTW Id goto dlsreports.com and run a speed test. Look to see how much bufferbloat you have, I was getting 5000ms of bufferbloat, I used the Bufferbloat function on my netgear router and started trimming speed until I got a clean connection. Turns out that that 120mbps connection I have with them after being cleaned is more like 70 mbps. Once I trimmed the bloat the sim started looking and running alot better…
Spectrum absolutely does support IPV6 throughout their networks. I have Spectrum and always pass end-to-end IPV6 tests to multiple sites. I do not use any Spectrum-provided equipment. I have my own modem (Arris SB6190) and router (Netgear RAXE500). The router is optimized for multiple high speed streams.
MSFS does now maintain at least some IPV6 connections if they are available. I have seen as many as 6 discrete IPV4 and up to 10 discrete IPV6 connections associated with the flightsimulator.exe process. If IPV6 is disabled (and the simplest way to do that is to simply uncheck IPV6 in your network card’s “properties” tab), then MSFS will use only IPV4.
I have never had any problems running MSFS when it is restricted to only using IPV4. Until the last few weeks, all MSFS connections were via IPV4 even when IPV6 was fully enabled on my system.
MSFS does not connect to “a” server. When the sim is running, it maintains at least 5, and sometimes as many as 10, individual TCP/IP connections to multiple servers in multiple geographic locations. Usually three of these resolve to Microsoft Azure services. For me, these are usually located in the Seattle area, though I often see a connection to a Microsoft IP addresses in Chicago.
There is always a connection to an Amazon AWS server in Portland, OR, and several to Akamai Technologies in New York City.
I have been too… Except today’s update destroyed Windows (bottom bar doesn’t work, so no start menu, no context menu, no way to start anything other than shortcuts to apps on desktop)… Had to wipe my system. Reinstalled Win10. Now gotta reinstall MSFS and P3D (XP was on a different drive, thank god…) But my MSFS2020 folder on C remained, so hopefully no download.
Had that problem also…all you had to do was start the control panel go to security and revert back to the last restore point… control panel can be started by start new task in the task manager
Great info! Thanks! I wonder, though, if it could depend to an extent on where one is in the U.S. of A? I am in San Antonio, TX, which surprisingly because of all the military bases here and a branch of the University of Texas seems to be generally well-connected to the Internet - but in the past, I’ve had trouble with Spectrum being on top of things locally and finding where in the path to my house a problem lies (mainly before Charter bought Time-Warner Cable).
On the latest Windows Weekly podcast on TWIT.tv, Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott (somewhat begrudgingly) seem to agree that Windows 11 v1.0 launching Oct. 5th is basically a reskinned Windows 10 with some modest improvements in interface and apps. Perhaps things will evolve to be a lot different with Win11 v2.0, which is already getting fired up in he DEV channel.
I did the Shift+Restart which puts you in Recovery mode and allows you to restore a previous point. Which I did, but somehow the issue persisted. I messed with different restore points and Quality Update Uninstall for a couple of hours before just reinstalling Win10… Win11 worked just fine until this update today. I am sure it will be fixed before the public release. I will upgrade again then.
Speedtest.net doesnt give you a number for the bufferbloat, and thats the magic number we want to find out. You can have 120mbps down and test good at speedtest, but still have a ton of bufferbloat, and the BB has a direct effect on MSFS.
It means more data is comming into the modem then it can handle, causing resends, MSFS doesn’t like that at all.
If your netgear router supports is, you can go trim it in there until you make the BB go down or away altogether.
The other thing you can do is find a broadcom chipset cable modem, and replace the old one with the new one and that should fix it as well. You’ll have to research well, because its not something that seems to be advertised on the modem boxes when you looking for one.
It seems that there are 2 predominante chipsets Puma and Broadcom, and the Puma based ones are the ones the cant handle the throughput of the connection and causes resends. And the resends cause MSFS to run / look like cr**.
If you router supports it, it should be under the QOS settings, should be 2 sliders. The way I did it was to start at my advertised speed 100mbps and then run the test. If its bad slide the slider back to 90 and run the test. Rinse and repeat until you get less then 100ms of BB. Ive adjusted mine to run around 70mbps and I get no BB on the site at all anymore. Of course that means that my 120mbps connection is really only 70mbps so it does tick me off…
I’m a network technician by trade and I can say that in my experience, buffer bloat is almost always caused by the router and not the cable modem. As long as the modem has enough downstream channels for the service that the internet service provider is pushing to it then it should be fine, although the Broadcom chipsets are usually more stable than the Intel/Puma ones. Many consumer grade routers are advertised as being able to handle 1000Mbps speeds but a lot of the time there is marketing shenanigans going on with those claims. The router can operate at the advertised speeds if the traffic is being routed between two devices on the same network behind the router because the router’s built in network switch has dedicated hardware for doing that but if the traffic is going out or coming in from the internet then it needs to be processed by the router’s CPU which is MUCH slower. Usually the garden variety router can only handle about 70Mbps on its CPU and anything trying to transfer faster will queue up in the router’s memory buffer instead of being processed immediately and boom, you’ve got buffer bloat. Setting up the QoS settings on the router will force the router to stop lying about its real transfer speeds to other devices that are connecting to it so the correct transfer rate gets negotiated and you don’t have servers or clients thinking that they are streaming data to a device that can handle 1000Mbps while it really can only do 70Mbps.
