IPv6 support on Virgin media

And the Virgin IPv6 counts continue to shoot up nicely:

DATE         AS      Users      IPv6-Users  %UKv6
==========   ==      ========== ==========  =====
2017_09_16:  VIRGIN  16,005,889      5,440   0.04
2017_09_17:  VIRGIN  16,036,765      5,749   0.04
2017_09_20:  VIRGIN  15,983,149      6,284   0.04
2017_09_21:  VIRGIN  15,964,868      6,688   0.05
2017_09_22:  VIRGIN  15,908,482      7,142   0.05
2017_09_23:  VIRGIN  15,874,060      7,070   0.05
2017_09_24:  VIRGIN  15,887,969      8,208   0.06

It's looking good, whatever it is.  If the numbers reflect a Virgin IPv6 trial in progress then it's now a pretty large one!

An update on the overall UK figures from APNIC, UK AS-numbers IPv6 usage, the 3 largest UK ISPs ranked by number of users:

AS-Company        Users         IPv6-Users   %UK-IPv6
==========      ==========      ==========   ========
VIRGIN          15,887,969           8,208       0.06
SKY             12,959,969      11,881,201      80.59
BT              10,795,618       2,583,414      17.52

After BT fixed its 3-month long IPv6 provisioning fault at the end of Q2 2017, their IPv6 counts rose meteorically, reaching 2.5 million in the first week of September.  Unfortunately they've frozen again now, with barely any growth at all in the last 3 weeks.  Whatever it is that is going on with IPv6 at BT, they seem to be unable to reach stable growth.  Also, their "imminent" upgrade of BT Home Hub 5 to IPv6 which was announced at the end of July (and would have increased BT IPv6 counts massively) never happened --- more signs of IPv6 deployment problems.

At least they have 2.5 million IPv6 users, a reasonably large population even if partial and poorly supported.

It would be pretty great if they started a trial. I would love to be on such trial, even if this would that I'd have to live with some potential issues while they're trying to sort it out, as I'm sure a number of users here would as well!

Come on, Virgin Media, start a "enthusiast IPv6 trial" already! :D

According to APNIC, usage climbed up to 1.07% of users on September 25th, and then crashed to 0% by 27th.  It's been bumping along around 0.01% - 0.02% since then.

The latter figure is about 1000 users, which was roughly what we were seeing before.  So either a trial started, ramped up, and then got abandoned, or this was some artifact of the APNIC measuring process.  Is it too optimistic to think they trialled on 80,000 users?

The figures on that website don't appear to relate to actual number of customers, Virgin only lists 5.4m broadband subscribers in their latest financial results. Sky and BT are more widely available with almost national coverage.

The latest UK IPv6 Council meeting took place last week. You can see the ISP update video on YouTube. Slides will no doubt appear on the council website in due course.

To save a lot of disappointment it's worth noting that there wasn't an update from VM. They were MIA (Much InAction - sorry, couldn't resist).

BT seem to have parked their HomeHub 5 firmware update project for now which is the explanation for the BT numbers sticking at ~25% of their user base.

This is where we stand regarding what seems to be recent VirginMedia trialing of IPv6.  Note that from APNIC's statistics we can definitely see that something is using VM's IPv6 address space and that it has trial-like magnitudes, but we don't actually know what that something is.  For example it could be a VoIP telephony trial with IPv6 connectivity as a side effect, rather than a plain IPv6 rollout trial.

As I wrote in the last week of September, at that time APNIC registered Virgin's per-day IPv6 usage count peaking at 8,208.  That IPv6 usage continued its rise to 10,301 on 2017-09-27, and subsequently ebbed away very slowly to a low mark of 2,919 only quite recently, on 2017-12-02.  Then suddenly at the start of the week beginning 2017-12-11 the numbers began to shoot up quickly again to the trial-like magnitudes observed in the previous event, reaching a peak of 8,642 on 2017-12-13.  Once again the IPv6 usage ebbed away slowly after that, today 2017-12-19 standing at 8,219 counts.

Here's a small table showing just enough sample points to illustrate the curve of VM's IPv6 usage stats over this period:

DATE         AS      Users      IPv6-Users  %UKv6
==========   ==      ========== ==========  =====
2017_09_24:  VIRGIN  15,887,969      8,208   0.06
2017_09_27:  VIRGIN  15,832,231     10,301   0.07
2017_09_30:  VIRGIN  15,806,838      9,972   0.07
2017_10_05:  VIRGIN  15,613,891      8,630   0.06
2017_10_10:  VIRGIN  15,497,418      7,231   0.05
2017_10_13:  VIRGIN  15,374,302      6,780   0.04
2017_10_16:  VIRGIN  15,173,282      5,872   0.04
2017_10_24:  VIRGIN  14,921,235      4,668   0.03
2017_10_30:  VIRGIN  15,075,295      3,925   0.02
2017_11_28:  VIRGIN  14,994,539      2,936   0.02
2017_12_02:  VIRGIN  14,995,791      2,919   0.02
2017_12_11:  VIRGIN  15,053,492      7,762   0.05
2017_12_13:  VIRGIN  15,066,456      8,642   0.05
2017_12_16:  VIRGIN  15,054,018      8,401   0.05
2017_12_18:  VIRGIN  15,071,304      8,262   0.05
2017_12_19:  VIRGIN  15,086,097      8,219   0.05

Although we can only guess at the actual meaning of these figures, it's clear that there is plenty of IPv6 activity in the Virgin space, which is a good thing.  It's also interesting that IPv6 usage fell only slowly between the peaks that probably mark new trial version rollouts.  This indicates that IPv6 connectivity was not terminated for trialists between main test periods, which suggests that the IPv6 deployment is already solid enough to be maintained over the long term.

For completeness, here are today's APNIC figures for UK AS-numbers IPv6 usage for the UK's "Big Three" ISPs ranked by their number of observed user counts:

AS-Company        Users         IPv6-Users   %UK-IPv6
==========      ==========      ==========   ========
VIRGIN          15,086,097           8,219       0.05
SKY             14,895,928      13,633,350      82.54
BT              10,429,227       2,647,048      16.03

BT has got itself stuck in the 2.6 millions again --- it happened once before, in July, but that was caused by a network fault which is believed to have been fixed, whereas the current one seems to be related to their inability to enable IPv6 on BT Home Hub 5.  With this new freeze on BT IPv6 growth, Virgin currently has an opportunity to enable IPv6 and shoot far ahead of them, and indeed ahead of Sky as well.  It would be a good time for it.

I'm not waiting any longer. Sorry, but this thread has been rolling for almost eight years. Maybe Virgin considers IPv6 to be "just for techies", but it indicates the priorities behind the scenes. Other ISPs may not deliver the headline Mbps you get over cable, but the bigger ones now seem to have their house in order, at least for new customers - and since one made a good offer this Black Friday, we took it. Didn't even bother asking Virgin if they'd match it.

I'll drop by in 18 months to see how things have been going (and if they have anything good yet in 4K). Maybe by then it'll be more than a staff trial. :catfrustrated:

I'm sorry to hear that, GreenReaper.  I'm sure that you're not the only one leaving Virgin Media through their failure to provide a native IPv6 stack.  What's more, customer departures are sure to accelerate the longer that VM delays on this.

After all, IPv6 deployment currently stands at around 41% in Southern Asia, 39% in USA and the Americas, 33% in Western Europe and 21% in Northern Europe [APNIC figures].  Those are colossal numbers, and failure to embrace and support this clear worldwide adoption is business suicide.

Over at the UK IPv6 Council group on LinkedIn, we were linked this very informative blog post about IPv6 Deployment at Dropbox, in which it was hugely depressing to see that the UK didn't even figure among Dropbox's stats for the world's top 10 IPv6-using nations.  Of our "Big Three" UK ISPs, Sky has certainly done their part of the job, so the blame for this failure lies entirely at the feet of Virgin Media and BT management.  As you say, VM customers have been calling for IPv6 deployment for some 8 years.

It's a very bleak situation.  The only faint ray of hope comes from seeing some kind of IPv6-related trialing in progress at VM through APNIC's public IPv6 stats.  Unfortunately, managerial failure to shout from the treetops that IPv6 is coming means that most people won't know that there is any movement on IPv6 whatsoever at Virgin.  Very bleak.

Just to confirm for the hard of thinking. Those IPv6 deployment figures for Southern Asia, the Americas, and parts of Europe represents sites that operate on IPv6 but that is slightly deceptive as it does not indicate how many of them are dual-stack because it is the proportion that are IPv6 ONLY that we have to worry about and which will be totally inaccessible to VM customers. Now if we can get some sizeable values for that demographic that will be something to be forcefully inserted into the VM group-think that is sticking its fingers in its ears and loudly saying LA-LA-LA to itself...

SlySven: The numbers that you're after would certainly be interesting, but we don't have them. Short of asking APNIC or some other big IPv4+IPv6 monitoring site to generate them, we're stuck with what we're given. The current stats do at least have the merit of being statistically very robust, because of the huge population sizes involved.

It's also a bit of a Catch22 to find a list of IPv6-only websites and expect them to influence people whose IP worldview is limited to IPv4, since they won't be able to see them. You'll probably have wasted your time.

The problem is actually worse than that though. The IPv6-only web is hampered by the IPv4 centricism of the last few decades, because the markedly sparse end-to-end user connectivity on IPv4 has created a highly centralized Internet where large corporate sites host the content created by millions of end users. When these corporate sites add IPv6, they don't drop their IPv4 connectivity, so you can't expect the IPv6-only website figures to rise by much to reflect IPv6 usage, at least not in the short term.  The web has been carved up and is effectively owned by the megacorps.

With the unhindered end-to-end user connectivity on IPv6, what the web has become may change if people wish it to, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will. Companies like Facebook will be trying hard to stop it happening in order to retain their captive audiences. This web centricism is the big elephant in the IPv6 room --- I expect IPv6 denialists to use "Where are the IPv6-only websites?" as a favourite ploy. Don't fall for it, as there are other factors at play.

Although there is little we can do about web centricism, end-to-end IPv6 connectivity will influence all protocols, and many new ones can be expected to appear and in time even to rival the web. It's these new protocols that I look forward to the most, new network abilities giving rise to new applications, many of which won't work on IPv4 because of its broken connectivity. Although the longer addresses of IPv6 get all the press because they're easy for people to understand, IPv6 actually heralds a whole new era in networking, far beyond addressing.

This has always been the fallacy of VM's view that "we have enough V4 addresses so we don't need to support v6".  If even a tenth of a percent (1 in 1,000) websites sites that I use become IPV6 only (and thus inaccessible to VM customers) then I'm out of here.

VM needs to remember they have a diverse set of customers.  I am using a lot of Chinese websites.  I'm really concerned that those are going to start to disappear in the next few years, maybe sooner.

Thanks to Teredo people SHOULD actually be able to visit IPv6 only sites anyway.

I say SHOULD as currently it works with any browser OTHER than Google Chrome, due to what appears to be some poor design on Google's part.

I was actually playing with this this morning.  I have turned off my v6 tunnel, and re-enabled Teredo (on most Win 10 setups, it's running by default).

Result with IPv6 only site: testv6.madore.org/

Chrome:      Fail (ERR_NAME_NOT RESOLVED)
Edge:          Connected to page
IE11:           Connected to page
Firefox:       Connected to page

Running a check with Wireshark, shows that Chrome only looked up the site's IPv4 record (it doesn't have one), then gives up.  Whereas the other three check for both IPv6 and IPv4 records.

Note that when I have my normal HE.net tunnel running, Chrome would connect to IPv6 only sites without issue, so this actually appears to be a deliberate programming choice on Google's part, and a poor one at that, being that teredo was designed to favour IPv4 if available but use IPv6 otherwise (correct me if I'm wrong guys).

However I do think Virgin Media needs to pull it's finger out when it comes to IPv6 deployment they've now missed two promised  dates for the commencement of IPv6 deployment.

While one hopes that they don't deploy dual stack lite over here, given the problems it causes with regards to NAT on IPv4, IPv6 rollout does need to happen sooner rather than later.  In fact, the longer they leave it the more likely it is that they'll be pushed into a scenario where they HAVE to use DS-Lite.

Tim

ravenstar68 writes:

> "While one hopes that they don't deploy dual stack lite over here, given the problems it causes with regards to NAT on IPv4, IPv6 rollout does need to happen sooner rather than later.  In fact, the longer they leave it the more likely it is that they'll be pushed into a scenario where they HAVE to use DS-Lite."

Those who run their Hub 3.0 in Modem Mode may have noticed that the three IPv6 DS-Lite fields (all empty on mine) that used to be displayed in its Admin->Info screen vanished towards the end of 2017.  It seems fairly reasonable to see this as indicating that they've abandoned their previously assumed plan to use DS-Lite for IPv4 provisioning over an IPv6-only infrastructure.  If so, those who understand the problems that stateless DS-Lite always brings may be able to sleep a little easier for now. ;)

It's no huge surprise, because deploying IPv6 using Dual Stack provides a much less bumpy transition for both customers and the ISP, so if the ISP has the IPv4 addresses to use Dual Stack, that's the way to go.  They'll run out eventually, but in the meantime it'll give them a smoother ride into an IPv6 world.

It's very curious though that the above change in Hub 3.0 web output occurred without affecting its firmware version label, which is still 9.1.116V as before.  I guess the CPE's HTML pages are held in a different part of flash, rather than being integrated into the firmware blob which carries the version tag.  It sort of makes sense, but it's also bad because it means that we don't have a simple way of detecting when Virgin makes a change to the hub's HTML.

Morgaine.

Spotted something interesting and unexpected today when running Wireshark against my upstream Virgin Internet interface on my firewall. It seems that VM's Cisco routers are sending out IPv6 Router Advertisement packets. For reasons I don't yet understand these are being ignored by my LEDE/OpenWrt router which is sending out periodic DHCPv6 queries which go unanswered.

The advertisement is for 2a02:8800:f000:2002::/64 and it doesn't have any other information in the RA. From a bit of digging on https://bgp.he.net/AS5089#_prefixes6 it seems that VM aren't advertising this address range (so no connectivity expected) though according to whois it is allocated to them.

Anyone have any clues or seen this before?

The full text from the Wireshark dissection:

Frame 422441: 118 bytes on wire (944 bits), 118 bytes captured (944 bits) on interface 0
Ethernet II, Src: Cisco_6a:80:1a (**:**:**:**:**:**), Dst: IPv6mcast_01 (**:**:**:**:**:**)
    Destination: IPv6mcast_01 (**:**:**:**:**:**)
    Source: Cisco_6a:80:1a (**:**:**:**:**:**)
    Type: IPv6 (0x86dd)
Internet Protocol Version 6, Src: fe80::5aac:78ff:fe6a:801a, Dst: ff02::1
    0110 .... = Version: 6
    .... 1110 0000 .... .... .... .... .... = Traffic Class: 0xe0 (DSCP: CS7, ECN: Not-ECT)
    .... .... .... 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 = Flow Label: 0x00000
    Payload Length: 64
    Next Header: ICMPv6 (58)
    Hop Limit: 255
    Source: fe80::5aac:78ff:fe6a:801a
    Destination: ff02::1
    [Source SA MAC: Cisco_6a:80:1a (**:**:**:**:**:**)]
    [Source GeoIP: Unknown]
    [Destination GeoIP: Unknown]
Internet Control Message Protocol v6
    Type: Router Advertisement (134)
    Code: 0
    Checksum: 0x7f6d [correct]
    [Checksum Status: Good]
    Cur hop limit: 64
    Flags: 0xc0, Managed address configuration, Other configuration, Prf (Default Router Preference): Medium
    Router lifetime (s): 1800
    Reachable time (ms): 0
    Retrans timer (ms): 0
    ICMPv6 Option (Source link-layer address : **:**:**:**:**:**)
    ICMPv6 Option (MTU : 1500)
    ICMPv6 Option (Prefix information : 2a02:8800:f000:2002::/64)

Well spotted, @davefiddes.  Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely that we'll be able to pin that RA to a role within Virgin's IPv6 rollout.  If the prefix were a /56 then we could reasonably guess that it reflects a full IPv6 end-user delegation, but a /64 could have any number of purposes.  Perhaps it's a VoIP endpoint address, and your Hub 3.0 might have grabbed it for VoIP use if VM had enabled your unit for telephony trials.

It's only a guess that such trials are running, but there's a good possibility of it since Hub 3.0 has telephony connectors and APNIC tells us that the 2nd of two periods of Virgin IPv6 activity is still in progress.  To my eyes, what APNIC is seeing looks like a limited customer trial of something involving IPv6.  VoIP would certainly be a nice side benefit of rolling out IPv6 for VM.

VM's IPv6 activity has continued to decline very slowly from its 2nd peak of 8,642 on 2017_12_13.  I'll just show the figures for the last week:

DATE         AS      Users      IPv6-Users  %UKv6
==========   ==      ========== ==========  =====
2017_12_13:  VIRGIN  15,066,456      8,642   0.05 <-- peak of 2nd "trial"
....
2018_01_09:  VIRGIN  15,144,351      7,253   0.04
2018_01_10:  VIRGIN  15,135,864      7,248   0.04
2018_01_11:  VIRGIN  15,128,961      7,060   0.04
2018_01_12:  VIRGIN  15,118,548      7,048   0.04
2018_01_13:  VIRGIN  15,105,046      7,041   0.04
2018_01_14:  VIRGIN  15,091,003      6,952   0.04
2018_01_15:  VIRGIN  15,079,064      6,845   0.04

This decline in IPv6 counts has followed a very smooth curve down from its peak, exactly as happened in the first period of IPv6 activity.  Unfortunately I don't have a hypothesis for why it should be declining, since once IPv6 is rolled out to a customer, there's no clear reason why usage should then ebb away.

If anyone has a better explanation for what's been happening, I'd love to hear it. :)

PS. Did Wireshark catch that traffic on the LAN side of a Hub 3.0 running in Modem-Only mode?

Morgaine.

I agree that the prefix looks to possibly be an internal service like VoIP. IPv6 is great for doing these sort of private services using a sane address space.

I've not tried doing anything with the RA offered. Suspect this might be a hiding to nothing without a DNS server or some knowledge as to where to talk to.

My capture was of all the Ethernet packets coming through my SuperHub 1.0 in modem-mode.

BT's IPv6 usage has just passed the 3 million mark of daily counts as measured by APNIC:

DATE         AS      Users      IPv6-Users  %UKv6
==========   ==      ========== ==========  =====
2018_02_18:  BT      10,652,846 2,993,510   18.47
2018_02_19:  BT      10,651,980 3,015,684   18.63

Well done BT!  IPv6 kudos earned. :)

In the context of the UK's "Big Three" residential ISPs, BT continues to hold its previous IPv6 ranking, second to Sky's massive lead but well ahead of Virgin Media's still unreleased public IPv6 service --- I've been hoping that the 6,490 Virgin counts indicate that an undisclosed IPv6 trial is in progress at VM, but there has been no confirmation of this yet, not even an unofficial one:

ISP-AS            Users         IPv6-Users   %UKv6
==========      ==========      ==========   =====
SKY             13,937,631      12,772,577   78.89
BT              10,651,980       3,015,684   18.63
VIRGIN          14,704,336           6,490    0.04

Reaching another IPv6-millions milestone is great news for BT and for the UK, but it should be mentioned that BT's IPv6 usage counts could have been very much higher by now. Their announcement to the UK IPv6 Council in July of 2017 that enabling their most common CPE device (Home Hub 5) for IPv6 was "imminent" raised the hopes of IPv6 fans greatly, but unfortunately that never materialized. In addition, BT provides no support for when IPv6 disappears from a residential line, and in fact doesn't even acknowledge its existence when you try to file a fault report. Clearly there is much that still remains to be done.

Despite that, 3 million is a very nice milestone to have reached --- well done BT!

APNIC daily IPv6 stats for the UK are published here: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/cgi-bin/v6pop?c=GB

Now we just need Virgin to join in the IPv6 fun. :)  The UK needs this, IPv4 is holding us back.

Morgaine.

---

Morgainewrote:

Now we just need Virgin to join in the IPv6 fun. :)  The UK needs this, IPv4 is holding us back.

 

---

Holding us back from what exactly, i mean the change over to v6 is pretty much just to ease the strain on the now limited v4 addresses that are available, chances are any major sites already have or can get hold of a v4 address, are there any important sites that are only doing v6? :P

Its not like v4 support is going to go away any time soon and the internet won't suddenly stop working

You can only reach https://loopsofzen.uk/ on IPv6

@shanematthews asks:
> Holding us back from what exactly, i mean the change over to v6 is pretty much just to ease the strain on the now limited v4 addresses that are available

Gosh no, that's only the beginning of it. It's true that the most commonly mentioned benefit of IPv6 is purely remedial --- to provide us with much more address space because IPv4 blocks ran out at the RiRs a while back --- but if that were all that IPv6 provides, there wouldn't be such widespread interest in it. Its most exciting promise is enabling totally new networking protocols and applications to be developed.

I detailed some of the future benefits of IPv6 in answer to questions similar to yours, so I might as well refer you to one of my posts on the topic --- message 283 in the current thread:

• https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/IPv6-support-on-Virgin-media/m-p/3189947#M62787

The last paragraph of that post hints at what I meant when I said that "The UK needs this, IPv4 is holding us back." We were actually one of the world leaders in networking technology at the dawn of the Internet, and we could be again. Unfortunately IPv4 has hampered the development of many interesting classes of protocols because NAT broke both end-to-end reachability and protocol transparency in IPv4.

That has had an extremely detrimental effect on the topology of the Internet, making it change from its original highly decentralized form into a heavily centralized one, because IPv4's NAT makes most people's hosts not reachable so they're forced to connect outwards to centralized servers. In addition, with NAT in the way, CPEs often have to be specially modified by their manufacturers to allow useful protocols to pass through, which is a major showstopper for protocol development. In effect, IPv4 severely constrained networking to a narrow subset of possibilities, while IPv6 lets evolution in networking start again.

Many of the ills of the Internet stem from what IPv4 has forced upon it, including mass surveillance at centralized sites, an almost total absence of federated protocols which would have put power in the hands of end users, and the rise of online megacorps abusing user privacy for revenue on billion-user social networking sites. Although many things contributed to this unhappy situation, IPv4 played a central role in making centralization almost mandatory.

IPv6 avoids that faulty design, and if our ISPs don't drag their IPv6 heels too long and help the UK to become a major IPv6 player, we could become leaders in protocol and application development again, instead of followers.  In the process, we might even cure some of the Internet's many problems.

Morgaine.

Although networking developers intrinsically understand the huge benefits that result from end-to-end reachability and protocol transparency, it may not mean much to those who don't work in this area, so perhaps some examples might help.

Consider two types of application which are both rising stars today: Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Both of these benefit from participant reachability:

• In VR, participants are commonly agents who animate an avatar in a virtual world. In the bad old days of IPv4, lack of user reachability commonly meant that the virtual environment had to be held on a central server to which participants were forced to connect. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for world non-scalability and lag, and it also leads to centralized tracking, abuses of privacy, and the creation of walled gardens. With IPv6 there is no need for remedial architecture like central servers, because agents can interact directly with each other. This is not only faster because the middleman is eliminated and the aggregate bandwidth is enormously larger, but also safeguards people's privacy by limiting knowledge of agent interactions to the participants alone.

• In AR, the environment surrounding the user is typically augmented by digital information from elsewhere, which  requires knowledge of the user's environment. If the user's system is not directly reachable, once again connecting to a central server is usually required, but the impact of this is even worse than in VR because now the server has to be kept in sync with the state of the user's local environment as well. As before, the remote server introduces lag and harms privacy, and update delays create a poor user experience because any discrepancy between local and remote states is directly visible and breaks the illusion of an augmented real world. IPv6 eliminates the remote server bottleneck as it did in VR, and also provides a new ability: the virtually unlimited IPv6 address space allows every object modelled to have its own IP address, so protocols can be much more elegant and efficient, communicating directly object-to-object.

Considerations like this are only meaningful to developers, but the end result is that IPv6 gives end users much more capable and streamlined applications to enjoy. IPv6 is a much better base upon which to develop new protocols for VR and AR, and most other advanced areas of networking will benefit similarly. It goes far beyond "just more addresses". It's a transformative technology, and will transform the Internet.

Morgaine.