IPv6 support on Virgin media
Does anyone know whether (and if so when) Virgin plan to implement IPv6 on its network?
Forum Discussion
They seriously need to begin rolling out IPv6.
I was just having a dig around again for any IPv6 news on Virgin, and stumbled upon this meeting (somehow I missed this one) http://www.ipv6.org.uk/2014/11/20/ipv6-council-meeting-oct2014/ . The meeting is summarised here: http://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2014/10/22/ipv6-support-in-the-uk/ and the important part to note is this snippet:
"We heard from network engineers within BT, BSkyB and Virgin Media covering well over half of all the end users in the UK. BT and Virgin have enough IPv4 addresses not to require rolling out IPv6, BSkyB don’t and therefore need to either implement IPv6 or Carrier Grade NAT (CGN), and they really don’t like CGN. Virgin are having portions of their address space taken by other parts of the parent company so may also need IPv6 or CGN. They too don’t like CGN, and already have IPv6 support in all their SuperHubs, even if the functionality is currently disabled. All three companies have IPv6 support in various levels of trial with internal staff members running dual stack. However, all three have plans to roll out customer trials in the first part of 2015."
Hopefully this will be some good news for some for IPv6 on VM, although a bit dated now.
TonyJr
No Virgin Media progress to report but other big UK ISPs are starting to make serious progress in IPv6.
Sky are well progressed in their IPv6 roll out. According to APNIC the UK is up to 8% of nodes capable of IPv6 and most of those are now Sky. Well done them!
At the recent UK IPv6 forum event BT announced that they plan to complete their transition to IPv6 by December 2016. The BBC reported on that here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34346803 .
A quick squint at the BGP peer status of BT, Sky and Virgin shows a healthy set of IPv6 peers for Sky and BT with a lot of similarity with their IPv4 peer list. The Virgin IPv6 peer list just shows a single transit provider which is unchanged from when @TonyJR posted on this 2 years ago! I'm taking this as a sign that Virgin aren't about to do anything serious about even trialing IPv6 any time soon. Sigh.
To be fair, VM wont do anything until they "need" to, unless they start running out of IPv4 addresses to issue they wont invest, its not like IPv6 is completely replacing IPv4 as the two will still function side by side
If that were actually the case, they'd be long done by now, since they started running out of v4 a long time ago. (That's why they can only give us a single WAN IP and no routed block, even though 98% of us use a router plus at least one more device. And it's been this way since I joined VM in 2001...)
