IPv6 support on Virgin media

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.