IPv6 support on Virgin media

[dgcarter]

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

[Morgaine]

@davefiddes writes:
> "VM seem to be heading to deploy as the Late Majority"

That's a possibility, although it depends very much on how quickly the smaller providers ramp up their deployments. It's worth bearing in mind that we have a huge number of Internet providers in this country, and the Big Three between them amount to only 62% of UK Internet users. This gives the remainder ample opportunity to influence the outcome, and because they are small they can turn on a dime.

UK IPv6 deployment would have had to have reached 84% for Virgin to enter the category of "Laggards" in that graph, so that seems very unlikely. Late Majority starts at 50%, and the sum of Sky and BT users represents around 43% of the population of UK Internet users, so even if BT IPv6 rollout had no blockers to its current plan, Virgin might still be able to avoid relegation to Late Majority if they hurry up.

It's not all roses ahead for BT though, as we heard at the recent meeting --- their Home Hub 4 CPEs still need development work to support IPv6, and CPEs even older than HH4 are still being used by some customers. This gives Virgin the possibility of creeping in with the Early Majority by the skins of their teeth, if BT has blockers, Virgin rolls out fast, and the rest of the UK responds slowly. That 50% figure will be approaching rapidly, but Virgin has a chance.

Trying to be optimistic, I think the possibility of Virgin coming in with the Early Majority may even be high. If we read the remarks by the BBC as strong signs of Virgin activity in IPv6 deployment, and if we choose to believe that Virgin cares about the recent PR pressure from Sky and BT (their immediate press release to ISPreview supports that), then I think that there is room for hope.

[Optimist1]

You'd think that Internet Society's site would support IPv6, wouldn't you? Well you'd be wrong http://isoc-e.org/

[Morgaine]

I wonder if they know how --- I couldn't find a single technical sentence on their site. 😛 Perhaps we should help them out, the poor darlings. There doesn't appear to be any significant hurdle, since they're hosted at Bytemark.co.uk which does provide IPv6.

More seriously though, this is the common situation in the UK, not the exception. The quite natural consequence of none of our Big Three residential ISPs providing IPv6 prior to this year is that our website operators have had no clear reason to adopt it either, except where they themselves were advocates. The relatively small number of IPv6 enthusiasts using tunnels or on specialized ISPs like AAISP didn't provide the mass audience to justify it on eyeball grounds.

The work won't be done once Virgin deploys IPv6 alongside Sky and BT, it will only have started, but it is an enabler. The UK IPv6 Council still has a long task ahead of it.

[artiomchi]

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@Optimist1 wrote:

Some news here http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/11/virgin-media-plans-adopt-ipv6-middle-2017.html

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Quote from the article:

> The spokesperson said that at the moment only about 30% of traffic can be IPv6 and the rest needs to be translated to IPv4

Goddarn idiots - they really are planning to go with DS-Lite, aren't they? So when they'd turn this atrocity on, we'd lose our public IPv4 addresses and sit behind a NAT we have no control over!

I really want IPv6 to go live. I really do. I've set up websites and networks running IPv6, and I'd love to get proper IPv6 at home as well, but as Switch in the Matrix said: Not like this

If that's what they're planning to do, I might as well just leave VM and find a better ISP before the S storm comes -_-

[Morgaine]

@artiomchi: I agree that IPv4 is likely to get very messy and painful, but to some extent it already is.  Just ask the gamer community about their never-ending fight against NAT idiosyncracies.

IPv6 offers the opportunity to leave that mess behind, and also to improve networking performance compared to what IPv4 has given us. I'm not dismissing that there will be pain on IPv4 ahead, but this is unavoidable pain because limiting IPv6 delegations to the number of public IPv4 addresses makes no sense. IPv4 address exhaustion necessarily implies that Dual Stack is only a transitional mechanism, otherwise the Internet could never grow beyond the limits of IPv4 availability.

The best way to overcome the problems of IPv4 is to encourage migration of the services we love to IPv6.

[artiomchi]

Oh absolutely! That's absolutely true.

What I'm baffled by is something else. VM already has a large customer base, which are all currently sitting on IPv4. I'm assuming the majority (if not all) of them are on dedicated IPs, assuming VM didn't exhaust their pool.

Running IPv6 and IPv4 side by side shouldn't change anything at all. It's (simplifying a bit) basically just giving the users access to IPv6 with dedicated addresses for each user, and leaving IPv4 in place as it is. Sure, once you get more users, and you run out of available addresses, new users will be put on DS Lite - it's unavoidable. But until then, I see no point in changing the infrastructure and forcing most existing users on DS Lite, and giving them a considerably worse service than before. (I'm hoping they won't do the latter.. I'm just concerned about it, based on what i read so far)

This would just turn people against IPv6. Remember - most users are not technical, so when support will tell them:

> Oh, we turned on this fancy new feature IPv6 on your internet, that's why you're now having issues on your XBox and Skype. What does it do? Oh, nothing much, same as before - gives you access to the whole internet.

The users will just go back and say that IPv6 ruined their internet, roll it back NOW..

[MUD_Wizard]

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@artiomchi wrote:
Remember - most users are not technical, so when support will tell them:

> Oh, we turned on this fancy new feature IPv6 on your internet, that's why you're now having issues on your XBox and Skype. What does it do? Oh, nothing much, same as before - gives you access to the whole internet.

The users will just go back and say that IPv6 ruined their internet, roll it back NOW..

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Virgin never tell you what has changed with their network, so IF they roll out DS-Lite in the future it will most likely be done silently. The potential fall-out would be similar to what has happened in Ireland:

http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057598420

[alwilliams]

I too hope they don't decide to use DS-Lite. I help run an IRC network (which has supported IPv6 for years now) and CGN is a cause of a number of headaches when it comes to abuse. For service providers, there's really not a lot you can do to prevent this sort of abuse in a clean way. If you ban the IP (which would normally just represent one user), you end up with huge collateral damage. For services that do support v6, I guess forcing users to connect using it is a possibility.

I worry about the sites and services that don't support v6, though. Suddenly the actions of a ton of other customers are tied to the same v4 address I have to use - and you can forget hosting any services or forwarding ports (sadly necessary because v6 support in the UK is still awful, especially amongst mobile providers).

The whole transition is going to be painful for some time, I think. Virgin Media would do good to allow us existing customers to continue using the existing v4 addresses as normal whilst it is still possible.

[ravenstar68]

I can't fault your argument there

In fact Virgin Media customers have already been impacted by CGN's in a different way.

Virgin has an outbound spam filtering on it's SMTP relays that relies in some part on the reputation of the IP the user is connecting from.  This means that in some situations, users sending emails when connected for example to a mobile network, have been penalised because the public mobile IP is blacklisted.  While Virgin doesn't block the mail itself, it does mean that mail from such IP's is more likely to be rejected by the destination.

Ravenstar68

[Morgaine]

Note that even if they move IPv4 over to DS-Lite, there is no reason why Virgin cannot implement "permanent" stickiness of the IPv4 address assigned to each user at the remote CGN port, at least until the day that they finally run out of them. Until that day arrives, the assignment doesn't have to be stateless.

For a long time, Virgin has been using the daft argument of "We've got plenty of IPv4 addresses" as their excuse for brushing IPv6 deployment under the carpet. Well if that was so, then this is the time to prove it by doing the right thing and using per-account stateful IP assignment.

Anyone want to bet on the chances of VM doing the right thing for a change? 😛