Virgin Media Community

[TonyJr]

How about some praise for the people working hard on this on the ISP side, who may not be able to talk about it. We know something is going on, so thank you VM engineers.

[Morgaine]

Don't forget that VM management may still kill the IPv6 project, no matter how much hard work the engineers put into it.  You shouldn't be counting your chickens just yet, unless you have an authoritative source of information for believing that it will happen soon. 🙂   That is particularly so in this thread where we've "enjoyed" so many years of disappointment that we've learned from bitter experience not to expect too much.

I will certainly praise the VM engineers, and I will do so wholeheartedly, but only once IPv6 is released as a supported product and it works.  Not before.

For now, the only praise goes to APNIC for giving us the raw data on IPv6 activity in AS5089 while Virgin Media refuses to talk to its customers about it.

[VMCopperUser]

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@TonyJr wrote:

How about some praise for the people working hard on this on the ISP side, who may not be able to talk about it. We know something is going on, so thank you VM engineers.

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I took my car to get a new tyre recently, after it was done I should have wrote a letter to the pressure gauge manufacture thanking them for making it possible for the mechanic to put the correct pressure in.  After all, they too were producing something no one really needed.

Just saying. 

Anyhow, I am glad that there's signs the deployment is growing.  I would say baby steps, but sadly most children who were in the womb at the time these things started to happen, well, they are in the middle of primary school now lol.  I would like to thank Morgaine for keeping us up to date.

It is interesting how VM have really sat back on this stuff for so long.  They did the same when Liberty Global (VM Owners) stated they were making a move to DS 3.1, VM have stepped back and said there's no plans to even test it in the UK yet.  Liberty Global are now offering "Gigabit" HFCN as a actual product - so it's well past testing phase!...

Sadly I have been around long enough to see some really bad things, and while I might be quite sour overall in regards to how VM has been ran, the product itself has never had any major faults.

If you look back you can see that they always leave everything to the last minute to do, and sometimes it goes wrong.  PHORM, Cloned Modems, IPv6, Legacy Equipment not getting upgraded even though it would benefit the network and user both.  There will come a point when they think forward instead of looking backward.  That time is not now.

TalkTalk will have IPv6 before VM.

What will be depressing is that IPv6 will come when it's like that pressure gauge.  VM Tech support staff are generally not that techie, so once IPv6 deploys on VM network you can be sure that the service center is going to go into meltdown.  Had they rolled out support early on then it would have given them time to test and fix issues.  As it stands now, they are just going to turn it on one day and hope.

[davefiddes]

True.

Was just thinking that back when I first joined Telewest in late 2000 they used to be progressive and open. I used to get a regular newsletter with service updates and future plans for the network. It was great. Since that died a death in the mid-2000s everything is so much more conservative and secretive. BT and Sky both seem to be able to be more open about what they do. I guess it comes down to a pretty fundamental corporate culture rather than competitive or commercial concerns. Very sad.

[Adduxi]

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@MichaelL01 wrote:

I don't know if this is any indication of anything but my internet cut off for around two hours and when it came back online my router is pulling a link-local ipv6 address through the wan interface of fe80::201:5cff:fe82:447 and nmap puts it as Cadant routing equipment using the bgp protocol. <snip>

Hmmmm, I wonder if I turn on DHCPV6 on my Vigor DualWAN router will I pick up a VM one as well ?

I already have one from BT, so another one is bound to help 😉

I might give that a go later this evening.

[davefiddes]

Give it a try but my router (OpenWRT) is periodically sending out DHCPv6 requests and doesn't get anything back. They're controlling access to the infrastructure to just trial participants for now it seems.

[shanematthews]

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@VMCopperUser wrote:

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@TonyJr wrote:

How about some praise for the people working hard on this on the ISP side, who may not be able to talk about it. We know something is going on, so thank you VM engineers.

---

I took my car to get a new tyre recently, after it was done I should have wrote a letter to the pressure gauge manufacture thanking them for making it possible for the mechanic to put the correct pressure in.  After all, they too were producing something no one really needed.

Just saying. 

Anyhow, I am glad that there's signs the deployment is growing.  I would say baby steps, but sadly most children who were in the womb at the time these things started to happen, well, they are in the middle of primary school now lol.  I would like to thank Morgaine for keeping us up to date.

It is interesting how VM have really sat back on this stuff for so long.  They did the same when Liberty Global (VM Owners) stated they were making a move to DS 3.1, VM have stepped back and said there's no plans to even test it in the UK yet.  Liberty Global are now offering "Gigabit" HFCN as a actual product - so it's well past testing phase!...

Sadly I have been around long enough to see some really bad things, and while I might be quite sour overall in regards to how VM has been ran, the product itself has never had any major faults.

If you look back you can see that they always leave everything to the last minute to do, and sometimes it goes wrong.  PHORM, Cloned Modems, IPv6, Legacy Equipment not getting upgraded even though it would benefit the network and user both.  There will come a point when they think forward instead of looking backward.  That time is not now.

TalkTalk will have IPv6 before VM.

What will be depressing is that IPv6 will come when it's like that pressure gauge.  VM Tech support staff are generally not that techie, so once IPv6 deploys on VM network you can be sure that the service center is going to go into meltdown.  Had they rolled out support early on then it would have given them time to test and fix issues.  As it stands now, they are just going to turn it on one day and hope.

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Its not really that interesting, as it stands the internet will continue to function with IPv4, none of the big players will be affected for a long while to go, VM also already have a massive monopoly on speeds so there really isn't any incentive for them to keep upping speeds, ADSL can't compete and gigabit is only available in certain locations, VM would need some sort of actual competition for them to make any drastic changes, and that isn't going to happen

[Morgaine]

@shanematthews writes:

the internet will continue to function with IPv4, none of the big players will be affected for a long while to go.

But that's not actually what's happening, quite the opposite in fact.  It's the big players who are driving the change towards IPv6, while the small fry drag their feet and rationalize away their inertia with a variety of sometimes funny excuses.  The only reasonable one I've heard so far is "Our IPv6 firewall isn't ready yet", but that's not a card that can be played for too long, and it's not an excuse for not preparing one's IPv6 infrastructure internally.

It is easy to verify that it is the big players who are driving IPv6 deployment.  Google and Facebook carry an immense amount of traffic as network application endpoint providers, and their user base isn't narrowly techie or specialist but cuts across the entire world cross-section of Internet users so it's representative of both "big player" providers and their huge user bases.  LinkedIn has a more enterprise-themed audience, but is nevertheless a big player with a very large user base.  All of these companies also happen to publish useful statistics about their IPv6 usage:

• Google: "IPv6 connectivity among Google users" passed through 25% a few days ago, and this growth lies on a fast upward curve.

• Facebook: "Internet traffic over IPv6" recently reached 22.5% and is likewise steadily rising.

• LinkedIn: "In the U.S. we now pass 50% IPv6 usage on weekends across all devices", and around 40% for Germany.

That the big players are driving IPv6 adoption is also well described in the Internet Society's State of IPv6 Deployment 2018 publication, from which I've extracted a few snippets:

• Over 25% of all Internet-connected networks advertise IPv6 connectivity.

• Alexa Top Million Websites: 17% with working IPv6 (up from 13% in 2017)

• Alexa Top 1,000 Websites: 28% with working IPv6 (up from 23% in 2017)

And from the same Internet Society publication, three paragraphs which nail it:

Facebook reports that they are in the process of turning IPv4 off within their datacentres; IPv4 and IPv6 from outside comes to their load balancers, and behind them it is only IPv6. The effect has been operational improvements and innovation in their software. Other companies, including LinkedIn and Microsoft, have similarly stated an intention to turn IPv4 off within their networks.

Microsoft is taking steps to turn IPv4 off, running IPv6-only within the company. Their description of their heavily translated IPv4 network includes phrases like “potentially fragile”, “operationally challenging”, and with regard to dual stack operations, “complex”. The summary of their logic is both telling and compelling:

“Hopefully, migrating to IPv6 (dual-stack) is uncontroversial at this stage. For us, moving to IPv6-only as soon as possible solves our problems with IPv4 depletion and address oversubscription. It also moves us to a simpler world of network operations where we can concentrate on innovation and providing network services, instead of wasting energy battling with such a fundamental resource as addressing.”

It doesn't leave any doubt about where the big players stand.  They're blasting ahead with IPv6 at warp speed, and internally towards IPv6-only.

Morgaine.

[Morgaine]

@shanematthews writes:

the internet will continue to function with IPv4, none of the big players will be affected for a long while to go.

[Morgaine]

Facebook reports that they are in the process of turning IPv4 off within their datacentres; IPv4 and IPv6 from outside comes to their load balancers, and behind them it is only IPv6. The effect has been operational improvements and innovation in their software. Other companies, including LinkedIn and Microsoft, have similarly stated an intention to turn IPv4 off within their networks.

Microsoft is taking steps to turn IPv4 off, running IPv6-only within the company. Their description of their heavily translated IPv4 network includes phrases like “potentially fragile”, “operationally challenging”, and with regard to dual stack operations, “complex”. The summary of their logic is both telling and compelling:

“Hopefully, migrating to IPv6 (dual-stack) is uncontroversial at this stage. For us, moving to IPv6-only as soon as possible solves our problems with IPv4 depletion and address oversubscription. It also moves us to a simpler world of network operations where we can concentrate on innovation and providing network services, instead of wasting energy battling with such a fundamental resource as addressing.”

[Morgaine]

EE Mobile Network Operator reaches 1 million daily on IPv6 (APNIC)

The UK mobile network operator EE Limited has today (7 Nov 2018) reached and exceeded 1 million daily IPv6 usage counts as measured by APNIC (1,001,735) --- well done EE! 🙂

Although these round number milestones are arbitrary, they do track the growth of IPv6 deployment in the UK very nicely, and in a timely fashion. EE also has the distinction of being far ahead of any other UK mobile operator in their use of IPv6, and as a division of BT Group, this helps cement their future growth in a world of dwindling IPv4 addresses.

What's more, EE's IPv6 deployment currently puts them in a very commendable 3rd spot among the entire set of UK ISPs, as Virgin Media has yet to roll out its IPv6 service among the UK's "Big Three". That said, APNIC counts show that Virgin has an active IPv6 trial in progress, so this situation could change soon. The current status is shown in the accompanying graphic.

For today's nice milestone reached, congratulations EE! 🙂

Morgaine.

PS. I posted this note in the UK IPv6 Council group at LinkedIn earlier today.  (I'll never understand why a bunch of IPv6 enthusiasts wanting to promote the adoption of IPv6 in the UK would want to operate a non-open forum, very peculiar. :P)

[andrewducker]

Glad EE have gotten themselves up and running.  I wonder when Three will manage it.

Thank you, by the way, for your regular updates on how Virgin is doing.  I'm looking forward to the next one, and seeing if the upward swing continues.

You don't have a page anywhere which updates itself daily, do you?