Hi all,
I’m in the process of setting up a new rental in Japan after being in temporary accommodation for a number of months with provided internet. In my previous country (Australia) I had a full set of Ubiquiti gear for my home network which I absolutely loved. I brought it all with me to Japan with the naive thought that I’d be able to re-use it for whatever internet I got here, but weeks of googling and reading up on Reddit about DS-LITE (and discovering that my USG is now legacy) and I’m starting to question if I should even bother trying.
What I’m looking for is some validation/invalidation and personal experience from other people that live in Japan that may have done some of this research already and is using the services and infrastructure I am looking for applying for and buying before I sink a lot of money into it and find out that I got something very wrong!
Sorry for the long post, but I do very much appreciate any lived experience and recommendations that the community can provide!
TL;DR
If you use Flett’s Hikari Cross with 10Gbps IPOE (DS-LINK) on all Ubiquiti infrastructure, and are able to expose your own VPN server or other infra and access it directly on a dedicated IPv4 address, please let me know!
Longer explanation
I work from home but frequently travel internationally for work. When travelling I often need to VPN into my home network for various reasons. Ideally I’d like to get the fastest internet available to me, but do need a fixed IPv4 address that I can both whitelist for outgoing traffic and expose a VPN server on for incoming traffic. I have Flett’s Hikari available in my area of Tokyo, so that means 10 Gbps. Based on my research, I understand that I should avoid signing up for PPPoE because the network gets very congested during peak times like evenings and weekends. I believe that leaves me with using IPOE via one of the various protocols supported by the different ISPs.
I’ve looked into ISPs and whilst initially looking at Asahi Net due to english language support, I’m now leaning in favor of Kamome because (at least according to another Reddit user) they don’t have restrictions on port forwarding and don’t do any throttling at times of day or for any particular protocol use. Either way, both ISPs offer IPOE DS-LITE as the alternative to PPPoE, and I was able to confirm from other reddit posts and their websites that they both offer fixed IPv4 addresses.
In terms of router and broader infrastructure, I have read various posts in /r/japanlife and /r/UNIFI from the last 12~ months that say that Ubiquiti gateways either are or are not supported for DS-LITE. More recent posts seem to indicate that it is supported but without much detail apart from statements like “yes I have it working” but without broader explanation about the ISP and backbone technology they’re leveraging. I asked Ubiquiti support directly and they told me that newer gateway models such as the UXG-Pro and UDM-SE do support DS-LITE (and was provided screenshots), which corroborates both what I’ve seen on Reddit, as well as early access release notes that I came across for UDM-SE, at least. DS-LITE is also mentioned as having bug fixes in a various more recent release notes, so it feels like a good bet that it is supported.
What I’m unsure about and would love some input on if anyone has experience is this the following:
- If DS-LINK is supported, does this also extend to or have any bearing on my ability to serve endpoints like a VPN server?
- Does this also mean that port forwarding over the IPv4 over IPv6 tunnel is supported, or is that a separate thing that I’ll need to figure out?
- Is there anything that I’ve missed or assumptions that I’ve made that are wrong?
- If I do require a separate router made for the Japanese market to support this, does anyone have experience or success turning this into a passthrough device so that the topology looks like Fibre point -> ONU -> Router -> Security Gateway?
- Can you recommend something without bells and whistles that would still handle the 10 Gbps (i.e., I don’t need an AP or large switch if it’s acting as pass through)?
Regarding 4. above, this is similar to what I needed to do in Australia as I had fibre to the building, which then needed a separate / dedicated modem/router that established the connection with the ISP infrastructure.
Thank you!
by Acrobatic-Swan-4843