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IPv6 support on Virgin media

dgcarter
Dialled in

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

1,493 REPLIES 1,493


@VMCopperUser wrote:

Opening it up to the tech'type people who often do the trials (I have not been offered a trial for a long time) just means that users who are more likely to use IPv4 forwarding and services that are mainly IPv4 could end up staying clear of the trial just because they want things to keep working.


As you are well aware , those that are on a trial cannot comment on the detail but I can’t currently disagree yet with at least that part of you statement! 

That said what is eventually released is often not exactly what is trialled? (EDIT: I Hope!!!)

Regards Tony
"Life is a Binary Inspired Turing Computed Hologram"(don't PM or @Mention me - in case ignoring you offends)
DEFROCKED

Sunday update --- again, the change in IPv6 activity continues to be barely perceptible.  Graphically the IPv6 curve is pretty much identical to a fortnight ago, so I'll just list the new fortnight's numbers this time around:

DATE         AS      Users        IPv6-Users  %UKv6
========== == ========== ========== =====
2018_07_09: VIRGIN 13,189,720 1,108 0.01
2018_07_10: VIRGIN 13,184,367 1,122 0.01
2018_07_11: VIRGIN 13,178,212 1,125 0.01
2018_07_12: VIRGIN 13,173,215 1,128 0.01
2018_07_13: VIRGIN 13,164,819 1,110 0.01
2018_07_14: VIRGIN 13,156,890 1,120 0.01
2018_07_15: VIRGIN 13,148,185 1,124 0.01
2018_07_16: VIRGIN 13,138,929 1,133 0.01
2018_07_17: VIRGIN 13,134,350 1,136 0.01
2018_07_18: VIRGIN 13,129,329 1,140 0.01
2018_07_19: VIRGIN 13,127,507 1,132 0.01
2018_07_20: VIRGIN 13,125,685 1,124 0.01
2018_07_21: VIRGIN 13,127,994 1,126 0.01
2018_07_22: VIRGIN 13,124,636 1,133 0.01

 

If these tiny growth increments are indeed signs of a customer trial in progress, I suppose one could at least conclude that IPv6 connectivity is not undergoing regular mayhem and collapse, as the growth seems to be fairly steady.  I don't really feel confident interpreting such small numbers though.

Rather more striking is the collapse in the "Users" column since the last update, a loss of 67,224 counts as seen by APNIC, which sounds dramatic but is only 0.5% of the population size.  I want to stick to IPv6 issues alone in this thread, but it's worth keeping in mind that IPv6 figures will generally represent a percentage of overall IP traffic, so the observed IPv6 growth may be masking an overall falling population trend.

Morgaine.

"If it only does IPv4, it is broken." -- George Michaelson, APNIC.

Sunday update --- again, no significant deviation from the snail's pace upward trend of the last couple of months. However, this trickle of growth is about to cross a watermark of sorts:

apnic_2018_08_05_Sun_vm.png


The last red bar on the graph marks the end point of the sudden collapse of IPv6 counts down to 1,203 on 2018-04-10, a value that we've been on the verge of recovering in the last few days. Here are the salient counts since that date, followed by August's figures so far:

DATE         AS      Users        IPv6-Users  %UKv6
========== == ========== ========== =====
2018_04_10: VIRGIN 13,783,600 1,203 0.01 <-- End of sudden collapse
2018_05_29: VIRGIN 13,338,454 882 0.00 <-- Low point of slow ebb
...
2018_08_01: VIRGIN 13,009,029 1,172 0.01
2018_08_02: VIRGIN 12,995,222 1,184 0.01
2018_08_03: VIRGIN 12,989,555 1,196 0.01 <-- Current high watermark
2018_08_04: VIRGIN 12,979,722 1,187 0.01
2018_08_05: VIRGIN 12,973,035 1,192 0.01


Of course, re-reaching a previous watermark of collapse falls a long way short of being exciting. Come on Virgin, give us a public IPv6 service. :-))

Morgaine.

"If it only does IPv4, it is broken." -- George Michaelson, APNIC.

ravenstar68
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@Morgaine wrote:

Come on Virgin, give us a public IPv6 service. :-))


Be careful what you wish for. 🙂 - remember if the ISPreview was right and Virgin Media, go with DSlite - I can see much wailing and gnashing of teeth ahead.

Tim

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more

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ravenstar68 writes:

Be careful what you wish for Smiley Happy - remember if the ISPreview was right and Virgin Media, go with DSlite - I can see much wailing and gnashing of teeth ahead.

 

I expect that you will be proved entirely right, @ravenstar68, and if so, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

How else could things turn out when a company makes it their policy to avoid consultation with their customer base about user requirements?  Instead of treating an almost decade-long discussion by enthusiastic techie customers as a valuable resource in an area where their management clearly has no technical knowledge at all, "management knows best" it seems.  It's almost inevitable that the outcome will be straight out of Dilbert.

The saddest thing about it is that the very diverse experiences that customers bring could have helped Virgin find the safest, most risk-free, lowest cost and hence most profitable path towards deploying a good IPv6 service, rapidly exceeding BT's lacklustre IPv6 numbers, and doing so more efficiently than Sky.  But no, customers have no value in their eyes beyond providing all their income, so they can safely be ignored.

It's comical, but that seems to be the world as imagined by Virgin management.

Morgaine,

"If it only does IPv4, it is broken." -- George Michaelson, APNIC.

To be fair, DS-Lite would be the right decision to go with in another 5-10 years when the majority of the internet is IPV6 and IPV4 is just for a few legacy sites.

But not now ...


@philjohn wrote:

To be fair, DS-Lite would be the right decision to go with in another 5-10 years when the majority of the internet is IPV6 and IPV4 is just for a few legacy sites.

But not now ...


DS-Lite would only be the right decision if VM were running out of IPv4 Addresses.

As a few people have suggested, the reason for DS-Lite may be so they can put us under cgnat and sell the IPv4 space to other places.

IPv6 only (in my view) would probably be better than DS-Lite.  Both will require work-arounds to get specific things working, and one is likely to have a impact on the network.

----
I do not work for VM, but I would. It is just a Job.
Most things I say I make up and sometimes it's useful, don't be mean if it's wrong.
I would also make websites for them, because the job never seems to require the website to work.

VMCopperUser writes:

DS-Lite would only be the right decision if VM were running out of IPv4 Addresses.

 

Unfortunately, ISPs have multiple very strong reasons for using DS-Lite or some equivalent technology that deploys native IPv6 without needing a native IPv4, and at least for Virgin, none of those reasons involves running out of IPv4 addresses:

• Running both IPv4 and IPv6 stacks in parallel internally (as usually implied by Dual Stack) is a major operations headache and has very high costs: it requires greater capacity in infrastructure hardware and hence either needs more costly new equipment or else decreases the scalability of existing equipment. What's worse, the complexity of a Dual Stack system is much more than twice the complexity of just one stack alone, because the two have to be kept in sync and extra care is required to ensure that IPv6 doesn't create security holes in IPv4 systems and vice versa. All of these issues in turn add up to increasing the skilled manpower needed to design, deploy and operate parallel stacks, and skilled manpower is extremely costly.

• Dual Stack is only an "IPv6 Transition Mechanism", not an end goal, because it deploys native IPv6 and IPv4 stacks together and hence chains IPv6 deployment to the availability of native IPv4. Since the whole point of IPv6 is to allow Internet growth beyond the constraints of IPv4, tying it to IPv4 makes no sense at all as an end goal. If we assume that Virgin management understands this then they won't be looking kindly on introducing Dual Stack in the first place. At best it's a stop-gap with high costs and extra security concerns.

• Since IPv6 stats show unrelenting worldwide growth, whereas world scarcity of IPv4 addresses has raised their market price to astronomic levels after RiR IPv4 exhaustion, no informed management can want their fortunes tied to IPv4 anymore as it's clearly a business liability. Add to that the attraction of selling off IPv4 blocks while the market price is high, which company beancounters will undoubtedly realize is only a short-term opportunity, and it's easy to understand the pressure on management to shed IPv4 as fast as possible.

• The rise of IPv6 raises the tantalizing future possibility of offering IPv4 as an optional and extra-cost service running over an IPv6-only backbone. Beancounters inevitably love this idea, and unfortunately DS-Lite is a direct implementation of this concept so it's easily sold to management.

All of these factors are likely to be pushing VM towards DS-Lite and against Dual Stack. (In principle the IPv4-over-IPv6 implementation doesn't have to be DS-Lite but could be some other technology that deploys native IPv6 without needing a native IPv4, but DS-Lite is the best-known solution of this kind.) The fact that they have plenty of IPv4 addresses currently doesn't even come into the above picture, except as a sell-off opportunity.

And that is why I agree with philjohn in message 546: DS-Lite deployment is more a matter of timing, and for VM it isn't related to running out of IPv4 addresses at all.

Alas VM management's analysis of "right timing" and of the risk of big bang DS-Lite deployment appears to be askew if the rumours are true. Given their many years of IPv6 navel gazing and refusing to talk to people, I can't say I'm surprised.

Morgaine.

"If it only does IPv4, it is broken." -- George Michaelson, APNIC.

I know this point is larger than VM, but while selling off IPv4 address space maybe attractive to bean counters, surely the continued availability of large chunks of space helps IPv4 to limp on, thereby undermining investments in IPv6. That seems to amount to a lot of injured feet?


@mhmeadows63 wrote:

I know this point is larger than VM, but while selling off IPv4 address space maybe attractive to bean counters, surely the continued availability of large chunks of space helps IPv4 to limp on, thereby undermining investments in IPv6. That seems to amount to a lot of injured feet?


Selling off IPv4 doesn't remove them, it just moves them.  In a way (a bad one) you could probably extend IPv4's life to extend beyond mine.  If only content suppliers had IPv4 addresses and ISP customers were all NAT then it would push the number of available address through the roof.  Quite a few website providers these days use some form of NAT on their end these days too using SNI (Server Name Identification).

Virgin have had this view that they didn't want to move to IPv6 until IPv4 ran out.  Virgin are not alone in this (their parent company seems to have a different view) and all around the world there are huge ISPs that have not deployed.  That's one reason why we are stuck with things like SNI.  SNI was a way for content providers to get around not having IPv6, BUT they only need IPv4 because the ISPs refuse to give IPv6.

But now we are ending up with things like SNI (Content provider NAT) + CGNat (What we will get) and that means that Nat itself will start to see issues too I think.  Before you had that 65,536~ port limit Per IP... Now that you have NAT on both sides then that limit could be reached pretty quick.
Imagine for a moment that your home has 30 connections to Microsoft, That means if 2200 homes are sharing the same IP that some connections will start to be refused (as there are no more ports).  That doesn't sound too bad, but now imagine that it's christmas and Amazon, BBC, ITV, and Youtube are all using AWS on the same IP... That could mean that homes will see streaming services not work.  While I know this is unlikely, it is something that's possible and easy to see.Dual Stack (not DS-Lite) in my view would be the better solution.

I know Morgaine makes a few good points regarding not having a proper working Dual Stack setup, but the cost, technical knowledge, and complexity of networks is something that any ISP the size of VM should be able to cope with.  My biggest counter (and original) complain about any type of forced NAT is that it will cause a lot of support issues, and I can guarantee that when people phone up with issues relating to CGNAT that Virgin media phone staff (and most forum staff too sadly) will not be able to understand the issue or offer solutions.

For Comparison, Sky finished rolling out IPv6 2 years ago (Sep 16). ~6.2 million customers, and BT nearly 2 years ago (Nov 16). ~9.4 million customers.The big holdouts are Virgin Media and TalkTalk.  If there is anything that should get an ISP worried, it's being lumped in with TalkTalk.

I believe both Sky and BT rolled out Dual Stack.  So I guess there are some isp's that have competent network techs that can cope with it.

----
I do not work for VM, but I would. It is just a Job.
Most things I say I make up and sometimes it's useful, don't be mean if it's wrong.
I would also make websites for them, because the job never seems to require the website to work.