IPv6 support on Virgin media
Does anyone know whether (and if so when) Virgin plan to implement IPv6 on its network?
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You need to try and convince Ofcom and the ASA that VM's lack of IPv6 is such a dreadful national scandal, then perhaps something might change.
Taken from the other forum, their current view is:
"The ASA rejected that complaint on the basis that: Most consumers wouldn't consider IPv6 as part of their purchase decision, therefore it won't affect what ISP they go with.
OFCOM have rejected it on the basis that IPv6 is entirely optional in the UK and they regard IPv4 as sufficient."
cje85: I replied to your message right after you linked the ThinkBroadBand thread, but on reflection perhaps it wasn't obvious that I was making a reply, my bad.
I won't repeat the spiel, but in summary, (i) we can at least talk to regulators, and (ii) times they are a-changing. On 1st January 2021 we are officially in heightened competition with the countries of the EU bloc. It is a strong reason for regulators, politicians and media to examine the issue with fresh eyes.
The US federal government many years ago required all subcontractors to support IPv6. It seems that now they're beginning Phase 2 of the plan:
- "US Government Plan to Complete IPv6 Transition"
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/fcs0jw/us_government_plan_to_complete_ipv6_transition/
The Reddit post provides a short summary of the milestones involved in US Gov's move to IPv6-only internally.
No surprise at all there, anything else would be future-blind to the point of insanity. IPv4 is like trying to fit the ocean in a thimble, and a broken thimble at that.
Hopefully the trial gave indications that they would need to give a lot of customer support.
Staff cost are something they seem to hate paying (Going by the complaints over the past few months about long wait times to even speak to someone I can only imagine whole departments are being exited?).
So if it looks like it will need a lot of customer support, they will look for another option. (My personal view)
I really hope the DS Lite approach is scrapped and the delay is because they are going dual stack like BT and Sky with a routed /56 or similar. Clearly Virgin Media are in no rush, so I'd rather the delay be for a better IPv6 implementation.
No one wants DS Lite. Its unecessarily less friendly and complicated, makes running your own kit harder, without having modem mode you have to deal with extra network setup and you'll no longer be able to forward ports for IPv4.
i hope virgin are ready for ipv6, i found this page interesting https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/10/this-time-there-really-are-no-ipv4-internet-addresses-left.html
That article makes it out to be worse than it is, all it means is there are no "new" blocks of IP's to be handed out, companies still have access to all their currently assigned IP blocks, and ISP's always have more than they actually currently need so it won't actually make any difference, it just means you won't get any new IPv4 companies springing up unless they are renting addresses from another company
Yea, I agree, If their user base was to climb fast enough to go past their IPv4 limit then they would be forced to introduce that NAT layer. So adopting it now is probably a good move as that limit being hit would be virtually transparent. Still, it should be possible when we do get CG-Nat for us all to have our own IP, similar to now, until such a time that they run out of v4's to hand out.
As for content providers. They have no huge incentive to move over to IPv6. They know users will have v4 - even if it's NAT v4 so why spend time time and effort rolling out their own DS solutions. I believe a lot of the providers don't want to move to IPv6 because of security/blocking issues. Right now it's easy to block an IP range/single address. That's going to become quite difficult with v6 as you'll need to kill huge blocks.
The biggest benefit is User to User hosting. Something that Content providers, Broadband providers, and most of the monetized industry out there cant benefit from. I have no doubt that User-Tracking/Ad services are also pushing back against IPv6. Creative IP changes could see that industry get stung.
I look forward to NAT going away. But it's difficult when no one wishes to lay the egg, or hatch it.
VMCopperUser wrote:The biggest benefit is User to User hosting. Something that Content providers, Broadband providers, and most of the monetized industry out there cant benefit from. I have no doubt that User-Tracking/Ad services are also pushing back against IPv6. Creative IP changes could see that industry get stung.
I look forward to NAT going away. But it's difficult when no one wishes to lay the egg, or hatch it.
That poses its own problems though. What are you going to be hosting that is going to be better on your VM upload bandwidth than on a server/CDN somewhere? It'll be fine for text pages, but all you'd need is 3-4 people streaming a video at once and your connection would grind to a halt. Any more than that and your users are going to be faced with buffering. If you want user to user hosting to take off, then we need to start looking at technologies such as https://ipfs.io which don't require IPv6 to work (as they punch holes and do lots of clever stuff) but would obviously benefit slightly from it.
Also, your IP address isn't currently a reliable tracking mechanism, as a) multiple people in a household share it and b) not every provider offers static (or "sticky" in the case of VM) addresses. Combine that with GDPR and I bet that advertisers aren't that bothered about it. If anything, IPv6 helps them because each user (for a given session) is guaranteed to not be sharing that address with anyone else. And if their OS doesn't cycle addresses for privacy reasons (defaults to on in Windows, but can be disabled) then they will always have the same IP address (assuming ISP keeps the prefix the same)
Yea, I guess your correct about users having the same fixed IP now, perhaps that's a bit of a win some loose some sort of thing. I would imagine that once IPv6 is standard then obfuscation through IP rotation will become standard. Time will tell on that.
And User to User transmissions need not be high bandwidth, As it stands how 15 meg can push through 4k HDR without any issues, so even if users are opting for video streaming I don't think that would be a issue. Honestly when I say User to User hosting I am meaning other things like file sharing (Family Photos, Documents, that ilk), Voice and Video chat facilities, Playing games, home security, cans of bean inventory from the tracker in the kitchen. Not everyone wants to pirate Movies all day long ;P. I could see tor/darkweb services enjoying IPv6 a little, but probably not enough for it to even think about (not a fan personally).
Users looking to stream to multiple people/places have better options too - ones that support multicast.
One of the Bigger problems for ISP's would be User to User VPN's to get around GeoLocation. Once that Ipv4 NAT layer is removed, then routers should be able to cope a lot better with a high concurrent connection, It could (but probably won't) help bring down some of those GeoLocation walls we have.
Not sure that blocking is that much harder in IPv6 if you mask off at the /64 level. That said if people have build a whole toolchain tightly bound to IPv4 they're going to balk at the engineering changes needed.
Saw an article a month or two back that suggested it might take 20 years before a majority have migrated to IPv6. Was quite depressing.
What's needed is a killer app that only works on IPv6.
Anonymous wrote:
What's needed is a killer app that only works on IPv6.the app can't become a killer as will not work for the majority of users. chicken and egg.
But the things is: I am more than happy use HE or other tunnel provider, just do not cap the traffic!!!!
Why even mention the shortage of IPv4???!!! 1 public IP per customer is not enough in the current world, and things like Nest Protect are not working without IPv6, there are a lot of tools and devices I want to have public IP, and the number of technology requires IPv6 is growing.
Let's have a few facts established:
- modern technology requires IPv6, no IoT without IPv6
- if you do not have a shortage of IPv4, then the best way to move to IPv6 is DualStack
Anything VM is doing with IPv6 doesn't make any sense, from choosing DSLite to capping IPv6 tunnels. They are just looking incompetent, 6in4 in their view is single-threaded or "like VPN".
after switching to M200, still the same issue, download is shaped at 20Mbit/s using HE.
How are you testing your ipv6 speed?
I just ran a test here: http://test.telenor.net/
I was monitoring traffic through my internet gateway, and it was definitely going through HE. I got full rate up and down.
However, repeating the tests now I'm getting much lower rates, so I wonder if HE have some sort of throttling if you use a large amount of data in a short time?
Andy
Both ksim and I were using think broadband speed test which should be an apples to apples comparison.
I've not seen any evidence of throttling even after a lot of heavy ipv6 usage on HE (all YouTube traffic goes via ipv6 for example).
Is there anything about how the tunnels are configured that might cause a problem? I use plain vanila OpenWRT 18.06 with everything configured through the LuCI web gui. My connection is through an SH1 in modem mode.
Hi Everyone
Trying to get IPv6, HE tunnel looks like capped by VM on 20Mbit/s, any other way to get IPv6 working?
That doesn't sound right. I don't have any problems running close to full speed over my HE tunnel. Here's a test I've just run over IPv6 (verified in Wireshark to be sure):
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1562670348732080055 (84.4Mbps)
and over straight IPv4 non-tunneled VM connection:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1562671135720630755 (111.91 Mbps)
The difference in speed is a little surprising. I've seen the IPv6 be within a few % of the raw connection. Perhaps LINX or the tunnel server is a bit busy at the moment. No throttle at 20Mbps though.
strange, mine is definitely capped, can't get speeds more than 20Mbit/s, tried different endpoints, still the same, I am on M100 and switching to M200 tomorrow.
ipv4: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1562679964207264655
ipv6: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1562680134842598755
Also saw a few topics on HE forum about 20Mbit/s cap on VM. :-( VM support is not able to help me here.
I recently had an engineer visit to improve cabl signal levels and took the opportunity to ask if he had any knowledge of an IPv6 rollout schedule.
He had none, but promised to get back to me with an answer. This, he did within a few days.
He reported that the initial focus is on upgrading business connections and that he had been unable to identify a schedule for starting residential upgrades.
Disappointing, but could it be that the observed growth fits this story?
We are currently up for renewal and Virgin don't appear to offer IPv6 but if we go through a re-seller they do so possibly they are letting re-sellers trial it for their customers first before virgin support it.
I would imagine business first would make sense as we tend to buy static IPv4 addresses so don't have to do CGNAT.
jeffsmith82 wrote:We are currently up for renewal and Virgin don't appear to offer IPv6 but if we go through a re-seller they do so possibly they are letting re-sellers trial it for their customers first before virgin support it.
I would imagine business first would make sense as we tend to buy static IPv4 addresses so don't have to do CGNAT.
Who resells VM connections?
What I don't get (other than no invite, they don't send me invites to do test any longer lol).. But what I don't get is why they are going to test DS-Lite. If it's to do with their wifi anywhere type of system then I think it's great, It just means that now your ipv4 address can follow your devices around right?
The reason I don't get it is that they have (or did have?) a lot more IP's than what they need for their current user base, so why add in any form of NAT when it's not currently needed. And if everyone moves to DS-Lite then that means all home hosting is going to stop on the IPv4 layer.
It seems like they went from one extreme to the other extreme. So does this mean Full Dual-Stack is off the table for the test, or off the table for good? Another thing I would be interested in is IF they move to a DS-Lite system would users be able to only use the IPv6 component of this, or will it be a requirement to use the IPV4 in IPV6 wrap.
Regardless of how they decide to deploy it. It's about time they actually started doing something.
Moving everyone to DS-Lite would allow them to flog off large chunks of their IPv4 addresses. These have significant value at the moment but this may not last for ever.
DS-Lite is a transition mechanism to an IPv6 only Internet. I wouldn't be surprised to see BT & Sky deploy this at some point in the future as (hopefully) the IPv4 Internet starts to become less relevant. VM (and other current DS-Lite providers) clearly would like to skip the full IPv4/IPv6 Dual Stack deployment. Understand where they're coming from, money doesn't grow on trees....but it seems very early.
Yes DS-Lite will kill all local IPv4 hosting.
Anonymous wrote:Yes DS-Lite will kill all local IPv4 hosting.
There are ways of still hosting on IPv4 even on a DS-Lite setting.
Do we know anything about the kind of v6 deployment that Virgin plans to do? It seems like most of their parent organisation (Liberty Global) is doing DS-Lite deployments, which is completely terrible!
@cmsj: Judging by the IPv6-related information displayed in Hub 3.0's Modem Mode under the Admin->Info menu, there's not really any doubt about what they have planned. [I starred out a couple of numeric fields, although they were probably just placeholders anyway, not real.] -->
IPv6 address : Not Available
IPv6 default gateway : ::1999:9999:*:*
IPv6 lease time : 0 days 0h:0m:0s
IPv6 lease expire : 0-00-00 00:00:00.00
IPv6 DNS servers : ::
-
IPv6 DS-Lite status : Disable
DS-Lite-FQDN :
DS-Lite-address : ::VM is of course silent as usual on the matter. Communicating with their community is not what they do, even less listening to their customers, otherwise Virgin would have had IPv6 dual stack 5+ years ago and we'd be happily chatting with their staff. (One can dream ...)
Just in case anyone was using a Tunnel Broker {and a heads up to others} and had gone with SixXS and had managed to keep it going for the last year or more since Virgin tried to kill such tunnels by crippling the EMail authentication that the SixXS IPv6 POPs demand in order to allow a tunnel to be initiated:
Sunsetting SixXS
Author: Pim van Pelt, Jeroen Massar
Contact: Date: March 2017
Status: Published
Summary
SixXS will be sunset in H1 2017. All services will be turned down on 2017-06-06, after which the SixXS project will be retired. Users will no longer be able to use their IPv6 tunnels or subnets after this date, and are required to obtain IPv6 connectivity elsewhere, primarily with their Internet service provider.
Introduction
SixXS (Six Access) is a free, non-profit, non-cost service for Local Internet Registries (LIR's) and endusers. The main goal is to create a common portal to help company engineers find their way with IPv6 networks deploying IPv6 to their customers in a rapid and controllable fashion. To reach our goals, SixXS provides the following services:- IPv6 Tunnel Broker: a versatile and high performance IPv6 tunneling router
- Ghost Route Hunter: an IPv6 route monitoring tool and various other services to help out where needed
- IPv6Gate HTTP Proxy: IPv6-IPv4 and IPv4-IPv6 Website Gateway
...Remainder at: https://www.sixxs.net/sunset/
Everything I recall reading on their forums {their site is a useful source of information all about IPv6 BTW} that DS-Lite is pretty much the worse way to continue to provide IPv4 connectivity...
So what size of subnet will those lucky enough to move to IPv6 get and just how bad will DS-Lite be for connecting to those parts of the 'Interweb that remain on IPv4?
