IPv6 support on Virgin media

[dgcarter]

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

[TonyJr]

I'd say that it could be Infrastructure addressing, but hey it could be anything. I shall wait patiently a bit longer...

[Morgaine]

And the Virgin IPv6 counts continue to shoot up nicely:

DATE         AS      Users      IPv6-Users  %UKv6
==========   ==      ========== ==========  =====
2017_09_16:  VIRGIN  16,005,889      5,440   0.04
2017_09_17:  VIRGIN  16,036,765      5,749   0.04
2017_09_20:  VIRGIN  15,983,149      6,284   0.04
2017_09_21:  VIRGIN  15,964,868      6,688   0.05
2017_09_22:  VIRGIN  15,908,482      7,142   0.05
2017_09_23:  VIRGIN  15,874,060      7,070   0.05
2017_09_24:  VIRGIN  15,887,969      8,208   0.06

It's looking good, whatever it is.  If the numbers reflect a Virgin IPv6 trial in progress then it's now a pretty large one!

[Morgaine]

An update on the overall UK figures from APNIC, UK AS-numbers IPv6 usage, the 3 largest UK ISPs ranked by number of users:

AS-Company        Users         IPv6-Users   %UK-IPv6
==========      ==========      ==========   ========
VIRGIN          15,887,969           8,208       0.06
SKY             12,959,969      11,881,201      80.59
BT              10,795,618       2,583,414      17.52

After BT fixed its 3-month long IPv6 provisioning fault at the end of Q2 2017, their IPv6 counts rose meteorically, reaching 2.5 million in the first week of September.  Unfortunately they've frozen again now, with barely any growth at all in the last 3 weeks.  Whatever it is that is going on with IPv6 at BT, they seem to be unable to reach stable growth.  Also, their "imminent" upgrade of BT Home Hub 5 to IPv6 which was announced at the end of July (and would have increased BT IPv6 counts massively) never happened --- more signs of IPv6 deployment problems.

At least they have 2.5 million IPv6 users, a reasonably large population even if partial and poorly supported.

[artiomchi]

It would be pretty great if they started a trial. I would love to be on such trial, even if this would that I'd have to live with some potential issues while they're trying to sort it out, as I'm sure a number of users here would as well!

Come on, Virgin Media, start a "enthusiast IPv6 trial" already! 😄

[impromptu]

According to APNIC, usage climbed up to 1.07% of users on September 25th, and then crashed to 0% by 27th.  It's been bumping along around 0.01% - 0.02% since then.

The latter figure is about 1000 users, which was roughly what we were seeing before.  So either a trial started, ramped up, and then got abandoned, or this was some artifact of the APNIC measuring process.  Is it too optimistic to think they trialled on 80,000 users?

[TonyJr]

According to APNIC, Sky now have more internet users than Virgin Media.

BSKYB 14,992,345
Virgin Media: 14,986,080

[cje85]

The figures on that website don't appear to relate to actual number of customers, Virgin only lists 5.4m broadband subscribers in their latest financial results. Sky and BT are more widely available with almost national coverage.

[Anonymous]

The latest UK IPv6 Council meeting took place last week. You can see the ISP update video on YouTube. Slides will no doubt appear on the council website in due course.

To save a lot of disappointment it's worth noting that there wasn't an update from VM. They were MIA (Much InAction - sorry, couldn't resist).

BT seem to have parked their HomeHub 5 firmware update project for now which is the explanation for the BT numbers sticking at ~25% of their user base.

[Morgaine]

This is where we stand regarding what seems to be recent VirginMedia trialing of IPv6.  Note that from APNIC's statistics we can definitely see that something is using VM's IPv6 address space and that it has trial-like magnitudes, but we don't actually know what that something is.  For example it could be a VoIP telephony trial with IPv6 connectivity as a side effect, rather than a plain IPv6 rollout trial.

As I wrote in the last week of September, at that time APNIC registered Virgin's per-day IPv6 usage count peaking at 8,208.  That IPv6 usage continued its rise to 10,301 on 2017-09-27, and subsequently ebbed away very slowly to a low mark of 2,919 only quite recently, on 2017-12-02.  Then suddenly at the start of the week beginning 2017-12-11 the numbers began to shoot up quickly again to the trial-like magnitudes observed in the previous event, reaching a peak of 8,642 on 2017-12-13.  Once again the IPv6 usage ebbed away slowly after that, today 2017-12-19 standing at 8,219 counts.

Here's a small table showing just enough sample points to illustrate the curve of VM's IPv6 usage stats over this period:

DATE         AS      Users      IPv6-Users  %UKv6
==========   ==      ========== ==========  =====
2017_09_24:  VIRGIN  15,887,969      8,208   0.06
2017_09_27:  VIRGIN  15,832,231     10,301   0.07
2017_09_30:  VIRGIN  15,806,838      9,972   0.07
2017_10_05:  VIRGIN  15,613,891      8,630   0.06
2017_10_10:  VIRGIN  15,497,418      7,231   0.05
2017_10_13:  VIRGIN  15,374,302      6,780   0.04
2017_10_16:  VIRGIN  15,173,282      5,872   0.04
2017_10_24:  VIRGIN  14,921,235      4,668   0.03
2017_10_30:  VIRGIN  15,075,295      3,925   0.02
2017_11_28:  VIRGIN  14,994,539      2,936   0.02
2017_12_02:  VIRGIN  14,995,791      2,919   0.02
2017_12_11:  VIRGIN  15,053,492      7,762   0.05
2017_12_13:  VIRGIN  15,066,456      8,642   0.05
2017_12_16:  VIRGIN  15,054,018      8,401   0.05
2017_12_18:  VIRGIN  15,071,304      8,262   0.05
2017_12_19:  VIRGIN  15,086,097      8,219   0.05

Although we can only guess at the actual meaning of these figures, it's clear that there is plenty of IPv6 activity in the Virgin space, which is a good thing.  It's also interesting that IPv6 usage fell only slowly between the peaks that probably mark new trial version rollouts.  This indicates that IPv6 connectivity was not terminated for trialists between main test periods, which suggests that the IPv6 deployment is already solid enough to be maintained over the long term.

[Morgaine]

For completeness, here are today's APNIC figures for UK AS-numbers IPv6 usage for the UK's "Big Three" ISPs ranked by their number of observed user counts:

AS-Company        Users         IPv6-Users   %UK-IPv6
==========      ==========      ==========   ========
VIRGIN          15,086,097           8,219       0.05
SKY             14,895,928      13,633,350      82.54
BT              10,429,227       2,647,048      16.03

BT has got itself stuck in the 2.6 millions again --- it happened once before, in July, but that was caused by a network fault which is believed to have been fixed, whereas the current one seems to be related to their inability to enable IPv6 on BT Home Hub 5.  With this new freeze on BT IPv6 growth, Virgin currently has an opportunity to enable IPv6 and shoot far ahead of them, and indeed ahead of Sky as well.  It would be a good time for it.