Following on from our notification in October, we began migrating our copper network inventory and information to our new copper broadband provisioning system on 1 November

Based on your feedback, we’ve taken advantage of our copper broadband provisioning system upgrade to align the UBA Remote ID to align with NGA. This feature provides a stable ASID-based non-repudiated credential that can be used to provide a strong level of confidence that traffic is coming from a particular end customer or location.

This change is system only, but it has resulted in a small number of cases where this caused problems with some Service Provider authentication platform that were not anticipating this information to change.

What’s changing
This change adds the following text into the UBA Remote ID field:

CHORUSNNNNNNNNNNB01

Where NNNNNNNNNN is the ASID, e.g. CHORUS0123456789B01

Noting that:

• It is system only, i.e. we have not implemented the change in the UBA network; and
• It only applies to services migrated to the new copper broadband provisioning system. This migration is due to be completed in March 2018; so
• The network will be progressively updated if the port is refreshed, a plan change is implemented, a faulty port requiring a port change or under some network grooming scenarios.

Supporting details
UBA has always inserted a Circuit ID into DHCP and PPPoE requests that can be used by you as a non-repudiated credential to provide a strong level of confidence that traffic is coming from a particular end customer or location. However, as the Circuit ID is based on the network topology, it can change under some circumstances, such as faults or grooming, requiring operational overheads to maintain.

With NGA, we introduced a Remote ID using the ASID that does not change during the life of a service. We received several requests to implement this into UBA to reduce the operational overheads.

We have implemented this change as part of our new copper broadband provisioning system. However, we decided to make the change system only to avoid significant end customer impact and risk. Therefore, the change will be implemented gradually under natural operational practices.

Although the migration will not be completed until March 2018, you may see the new Remote ID appearing in a small number of services before then. Some of you have experienced authentication issues as a result.

If you are experiencing problems with PPP authentication, please carry out your standard troubleshooting steps, while being aware that the change to Remote ID field could be a factor behind such problems. If it is due to the Remote ID field change than we recommend that you:

• Configure the Remote ID (CHORUSNNNNNNNNNNB01) into your Radius;
• Configure your Radius to ignore Remote ID; or
• As a temporary fix, we can change the Remote ID to its old value. However, this is only a temporary solution as it will revert back to the new Remote ID under multiple operational conditions

It is recommended that you consider proactively adding Remote ID to your Radius for all existing UBA services so it can automatically be used when the network is organically updated.

Next steps
Please contact your service delivery manager with any queries or feedback.