IPv6 support on Virgin media

[dgcarter]

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

[Morgaine]

Given the comments about unhelpful video formats or video providers, poor audio quality and embarrassingly uninformative content, I'll give the knife yet another turn by pointing out that Sky got that aspect right as well.

Have a look at their presentation at UKNOF33 on 19 Jan 2016, by the same Ian Dickinson whose slides I linked in message 288, recorded in perfect HD video and crystal clear audio, and delivered by Youtube over HTML5. Even more importantly though, enjoy an astoundingly informative talk laced with a good dollop of humour:

• "UKNOF33 - Sky Broadband IPv6 Update", Jan 2016
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoqGvZr4Uto

You might want to replay the final moments for an extremely brief comment about BT's and VM's plans on IPv6.

(PS.  Just to be clear, I have no involvement with Sky of any kind whatsoever, and I don't expect to.  They just seem to have done a very good job on IPv6, including communication, and that deserves some well-earned applause.)

Morgaine.

[Morgaine]

@ravenstar68: I finally managed to play that 2015 video you mentioned, and you were right, Virgin's stance was beyond embarrassing. Here it is on the IET site, which unfortunately has rather poor cross-platform compatibility:

• Virgin Media IPv6 Update, Darryl Tanner, 2015-09-23
• https://tv.theiet.org/?videoid=7412

How he let the secrecy-mad policy makers at VM do that to him, I'll never understand.  It really made him look unprofessional, and worse, a powerless minion under the thumb of incompetent management.  If business planners don't want to state release dates, fine, that's a business matter for them alone, but technical design and progress is a technical matter for VM's technical people, and Darryl should have been free to speak about it at a technical meeting, merely avoiding dates.

[Optimist1]

As soon as I click on that video to play it, it goes blank. I'm sure it isn't because I am using a VM connection...

[Morgaine]

Unfortunately, that's true, and for a professional engineering organization like the IET, that should be quite an embarrassment. Interoperability is a key property of high quality communications, exactly as expressed in the IETF Mission Statement, but the IET has taken their eye off that ball. (Easy to see the source of the problem, countless Javascript sources and no page addressibility --- their web developers went for gloss and sacrificed engineering quality.)

How about that, we can say something positive about Virgin for a change: their community site is more interoperable than that of the IET. It's just a pity that Virgin doesn't use it themselves. Communication by silence doesn't work.

[Optimist1]

The problem VM needs to address us this - how will they provide their customers connectivity to websites which are not reachable via IPv4?

Example:

ipv6.cybernode.com

[Morgaine]

---

@Optimist1 wrote:

The problem VM needs to address is this - how will they provide their customers connectivity to websites which are not reachable via IPv4?

---

Indeed, one of the important IPv6 benefits short-listed in message 283 of this thread was:

• 6. Adding IPv6 lets you see the whole Internet, not just the IPv4 part.

The problem is much greater than it seems, because here in the English-speaking West we have a skewed perception of the size of the IPv6 Internet from which the majority of non-technical users are being denied by their IPv4-only residential ISPs. It stems from the fact that USA ran out of unused IPv4 blocks only recently, and the common american view of the world that "Only what we do matters" taints all of the English-speaking nations quite strongly, through TV, news, film, music, and so on. Unfortunately they command our meme space to a large degree.

The reality is quite different to the US-influenced perception. The five Regional Internet Registries (RIR) started running out of IPv4 addresses to allocate a long time ago, beginning with the Asia-Pacific RIR (APNIC) in April of 2011. (The RIR for UK/Europe is RIPE NCC, and for the american continent, ARIN.) Here's the full list of exhaustions shown by the excellent monitoring site potaroo.net which has very detailed information and is well worth a visit:

• RIR             Projected Exhaustion Date          IPv4 /8s left in RIR Pool
  
• APNIC:           19-Apr-2011 (actual)                           0.4617
• RIPE NCC:      14-Sep-2012 (actual)                          0.8497
• LACNIC:         10-Jun-2014 (actual)                           0.0520
• ARIN:             24 Sep-2015 (actual)                           0.0010
• AFRINIC:        20-Jun-2018                                        1.5272

The nations of the Asia-Pacific region are the most rapidly evolving on the planet and carry out the bulk of electronics manufacturing for the West, so it's no surprise that they ran out first. Ever since 2011, new addresses allocated in that region have necessarily been of IPv6 only, other than a little IPv4 recycling and selling at an ever increasing cost. As a result, the size of the IPv6 Internet in the Pacific rim is vast, but for the English speaking regions, out of sight is largely out of mind. What you don't see you don't know that you don't see.

It should be a matter of pride for a UK ISP to offer their subscribers direct access to the whole Internet, both the old IPv4 part whose growth has almost hit its ceiling now, and the new IPv6 part that has been expanding non-stop for over half a decade in the most rapidly evolving areas of the world. Techies can create their own IPv6 tunnels with only a little pain, but it's entirely beyond the average non-technical subscriber who doesn't even know what IPv4 means.

This includes most of our families and non-technical friends, for whom the rapidly expanding IPv6 Internet is invisible. Furthermore, what's the point of even a techie Virgin user setting up an IPv6 tunnel and putting their blog up on it, when they can't say to their families and non-technical friends "Hey, look what I've made" because those people don't have the ability to see it if they're on VM or another slow-moving ISP. It's entirely unsatisfactory.

Lack of IPv6 in residential broadband has a very strong chilling effect, and it turns us into another "smalltown" nation with limited horizons and inability to communicate with the rest of the world. It's a disservice to the UK.

[Morgaine]

@Optimist1: I wrote a detailed post on your very good point yesterday, but unfortunately I made the mistake of correcting the 1-character typo in the quote during my final polishing edit and that seems to have sent my reply into moderation so it vanished. The moral is, either don't correct typos in quotes or alternatively use old-fashioned manual quoting instead of the inbuilt quoting system. 😛

I guess it'll appear when the moderators get into the office tomorrow. Meanwhile here's a Kudo at least. 🙂

[Optimist1]

Thanks, Morgaine!
More news about the competition -
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/09/uk-isp-sky-broadband-officially-finish-roll-ipv6.html
Time for VM to get a move on!

[Martin_D]

The next IPv6 Council annual meeting will be held at the IET in London on 31st October, 2016.

Status update from Virgin Media on IPv6 from Daryl Tanner

http://www.ipv6.org.uk/blog/

[Morgaine]

@Martin_D: That'll be interesting. I just hope that Darryl has had a serious think about what Virgin's communication-blocking business people did to him professionally at his last talk, and has made waves in the company about it. Another session of embarrassment would do neither him nor VM any favours. Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself to avoid your career being abused like that by people who set pointless rules outside of their area of competence.

It's perfectly possible to give an informative technical talk without revealing any significant business details at all. What's more, VM can't even claim that it's secrecy for trade advantage, since they're coming in last of the Big Three on IPv6. It's just pure PHB silliness, and it's completely counter-productive. The only people who benefit are the competition who have a good laugh at VM's expense.

Let's do better this time around, VM, please?