No matter how much I think I have come to accept the fact that British Telecom are massively incompetent, they always seem to be able to come up with a new way to fuck up which can still surprise me. It's a talent, it really is.

BT own most of the copper to our homes in the UK, and provide DSL services to an ISP of our choice. BT is paid to pass PPP frames between the DSL subscriber and the ISP, over L2TP or some similar mechanism.

The content of the PPP frames is something that BT shouldn't be involved with. But due to a bug in some of their Cisco kit (and don't get me started on Cisco this week, either), certain packets are getting 'eaten' in transit.

BT, in their 'wisdom', have declared that they are not intending to fix the bug. For technical reasons, IPv4 packets happen to get away without tickling this bug in the transport, while (some) IPv6 packets do fall foul of it. So although this is clearly a bug in the service which BT are contracted to provide, their response is:

"BT currently supports IPv4 on it's[sic] Broadband products and does not support IPv6".

They seem to have missed the point that this is a generic problem in their transport. And it's a problem for which a patch exists, too!

Fucking Useless Telco.

A&A's response, as ever, is wonderful:

"Of course we are wondering what else BT do not "support" now.
We exchange data with them at a low level (L2TP and PPP). When a higher level (IPv6) broken their answer is that they never said they support IPv6
But they do not state they "support" email either, or web pages, or MSN...
BT have never said they "support" web sites with a lime green background colour...
We have asked BT what they do "support" over PPP, including the above list..."

(The Register, /.)