IPv6 support on Virgin media

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TonyHoyle wrote:

It's good to read this thread every couple of years, it's like an old friend..

Anyway I've just upgraded to gigabit and after a series of network upgrades that cost £<don't tell the wife> I can speed test at around 1.1/1.2Gbps.  Yay.

But the HE tunnel I have caps out at around 400Mbps.. I wouldn't expect a 60% overhead.. are VM still doing silly things with tunnels?

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Sometimes it can vary, for a variety of reasons, in some cases some of the POPs on HE's end could be particularly over utilised reducing speed as there is no SLA, however considering you can only get around 15-20 Mbps max when CPU bottlenecks on Hub3 and below, 400 Mbps isn't that bad to be honest. Sure you aren't getting your full speed like IPv4, but then you're not running native IPv6 either, trade off. 60% is certainly not just overhead though, there's other factors causing that, which you probably can't really control and it will probably change tomorrow.

The official response from Virgin Media is they've never done anything specific to limit speed with 6in4 so they aren't doing "silly things", even Liberty Global engineers confirmed that there is nothing like QoS or speed capping going on after we kicked up enough of a noise, they couldn't find any issues in the network that reproduced the poor performance, so the CPE hardware was deemed the issue and indeed over time it appears that 6in4 is heavily tied to CPU and all of CPEs prior to the Hub4 didn't handle it well at all. The Hub4 by chance doesn't have the same issue mostly down to a more powerful CPU (although it's still that god awful intel Puma architecture) and the Hub5 being also more powerful and not Intel Puma fairs much better.

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TonyHoyle wrote:

It's good to read this thread every couple of years, it's like an old friend..

Anyway I've just upgraded to gigabit and after a series of network upgrades that cost £<don't tell the wife> I can speed test at around 1.1/1.2Gbps.  Yay.

But the HE tunnel I have caps out at around 400Mbps.. I wouldn't expect a 60% overhead.. are VM still doing silly things with tunnels?

 

 

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I am able to get almost 500 Mbit/s over my tunnel (typically 420-460) but my IPv4 connection now reaches almost the mythical 1 Gbit (sometimes even a tad over). I suspect this isn't VM now (though of course they might still be a factor) but rather something else. The 'problem' with VM used to be that their routers were very bad at handling the IPv4 UDP traffic that 6in4 tunnels rely on but I have observed that with my new Hitron Chita router I can now run iperf3 IPv4 UDP tests and achieve around 800 Mbit/s (the test server is the limiting factor for me in this case).

IPv6 intrinsically has more overhead, plus the HE tunnel MTU is also 1480 versus the normal 1500 so both those will add some extra overhead (though not 60% of course). I have also observed that many IPv6 routes seem to have a path MTU of only 1280, for some inexplicable reason, so that will certainly impact throughput too.

Much as I'd love to blame VM I think they are probably off the hook in this case. I think the reduced IPv6 throughput compared to IPv4 is likely due to a combination of factors rather than one single thing. But that's just a guess really.

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lewislfoster wrote:

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this but ive noticed im receiving ICMP6 router advertisements on my WAN interface and it does appear to give prefix information, i am yet to try to configure my router (pfsense, got a hub 4 in modem mode) for dual stack WAN, currently using hurricane electric's 6in4 tunnel for IPv6 connectivity (so far i havent noticed any performance issues with it). Ill try configuring my router to use prefixes from the router advertisement and see how it works (if at all)

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I think this has been mentioned before, although not sure prefixes were also being advertised.

Be interested to hear how you get on.

Andy

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jamesmacwhite wrote:

Well who's going to be first Openreach FTTP or Virgin Media IPv6? Openreach won, FTTP gone live in my area as of today.

A few more options for IPv6 now at least.

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Wish that was open in my area.  I would leave today.  Being able to change providers at the end of your contract and keep rougly the same service is great.  £63 a month for 200 meg Virgin or a faster service on BT/Other for ~£30 with IPv6 AND a much higher upload speed... Nom Nom Nom, take that today I say 😛

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rowlf wrote:

I've just set up a tunnelbroker.net IPv6 connection to my OPNsense router. Some drop off in speed via IPv6 but nothing like the 20Mbps cap seen by others in this thread:

This is using a Virgin Media Hub 5 in modem mode on a nominally 250Mbps plan.

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Yes, the Hub 5 having a different CPU and hardware design allows for better performance, It's mainly the Hub3 and below that has issues with 6in4. While the Hub4 is still Intel Puma based, it does have faster hardware which somewhat mitigates the issue in a lot of cases

nope no IPv6 (even after 12 years of this being open) and no clue when (or even if now, apparently) its going to happen

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earthworm48 wrote:

I’m coming to this late so my catch up is there isn’t IPv6 currently on VM and idea when it will rollout?

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official plans were in 2019.

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adhawkins wrote:

Got my pre-order in with Giganet for FTTP with City Fibre. Static IPv4 and fully working IPv6 at 900 MBits/sec symmetric (for £41 a month).

Just got to wait for them to finish the laying of the infrastructure so I can sort out an install date.

Andy

 

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When CityFibre come to my area (it is' scheduled' apparently) I will certainly look at them. if they can provide a service at a suitable price point and do it without needing to dig up my front garden/drive then it may well be a no-brainer.

This, it's a step backwards in terms of IPv4 connectivity

Too right, no one who's interested in using IPv6 productively should want or promote DS-Lite. I suspect oliverbrown1119 is here shilling for Alpha Infolab, rather than trying to engage in constructive discourse...

The last thing we want is the person who deals with Email server upgrades to work on the IPv6 upgrade......

DS-Lite was a technically easy thing to roll out, I think they seen the hassle it would cause and that's why it's not rolled out.

got to put it in my calendar to remind me

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WiteWulf wrote:

I love how this thread keeps trundling along; sad no one celebrated its 13th birthday back in March, though. We must remember to come back next year and mark the occasion

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I got a fiber option now! and other companies giving 500/500 for the same price as virgin 200, I am gone as soon as my contract with VM runs out.