IPv6 support on Virgin media

[dgcarter]

Does anyone know whether (and if so when) Virgin plan to implement IPv6 on its network?

[TonyJr]

I think you will find that if you look at the flags of the RA, it is set for Managed Address configuration. This also know as stateful (DHCPv6) address configuration. The next flag Other configuration dictates that other configuration is not provided by RAs and is provided by either the host or another mechanism (DHCPv6 in this case). This for example could be DNS server entires or other scope-configurable options.

Prefix sizes are requested by preference by the DHCPv6 client if configured, wether the DHCPv6 server honours this is down to its configuration. The same applies to sticky prefixes.

I hope this clears up the confusion.

[Morgaine]

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.

[Wez2025]

well its 2018 now lol

[shanematthews]

---

@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? 😛

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

[antxxxx]

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

[Morgaine]

@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#...

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.

[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.

[SlySven]

+1 Wot, (s)he said.

Whilst I miss not wasting time on Loops of Zen, the straightforwardness of establishing direct peer-to-peer connectivity between IPv6 hosts is something many IPv4-bound users are not going to get. Thank you Morgaine for given us just a couple of reasons why that Michaelson person is right...

[shanematthews]

---

@antxxxxwrote:

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

---

Well i can access the site just fine on my VM connection and i don't have a public facing IPv6 😛

[ravenstar68]

Being as Loops of Zen is only accessible over IPv6 you must be accessing it via Teredo or some other tunnelling mechanism, whether your aware of this is another matter.

However Tunnelling mechanisms are only a stopgap.

Tim