IPv6 support on Virgin media

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?

Virgin have given a presentation at the IPV6 Transition Workshop: https://www.ipv6.org.uk/2018/10/26/ipv6-transition-workshop-sep-2018/

In it they talk about implementation decisions for DS-Lite.  So it looks very-much like that's the direction they're taking.

Hi @andrewducker, and thanks. :-)

I have automated my data collection and post-processing at last (I was scraping it manually from APNIC for more than a year, quite a lot of work), but alas the processed data is all purely internal for now.  Maybe I'll get enthused enough by Virgin's release of a public IPv6 service to do something more!  Well, one can dream ... :P

Yes, very nice to see EE moving boldly into the IPv6 mobile future.  For an IPv6 enthusiast, it makes the choice of mobile provider pretty easy! :-)

Thanks for the link to IPV6 Transition Workshop --- I'll take a look at that now.

Thanks for the pointer @andrewducker.

Makes for interesting reading. Seems like DS-Lite is in our future. Also, looking at the other 4-6 transition technologies discussed it looks like Sky are at least considering MAP-T. IPv4 on domestic broadband's days may be numbered.

The writing has been on the wall for DS-Lite for a while, so that bit isn't much of a surprise.

Reading the presentation, I'm trying to understand how the transition to DS-Lite will work.  In particular, the need for the router to do 4-in-6 encapsulation as far as VM's edge routers (the router running the B4 part of AFTR).  That's fine on VM's own superhubs acting as routers, but how does it work for those with their own?  If my own router doesn't support B4, what will VM do?

1. Tell me to buy a new router or they cut me off / force me to use the VM router
2. Man-in-the-middle in the modem (which isn't plain modem any more), or in the CMTS
3. Just keep me IPv4 only, until I replace my router (could be a decade)
4. Issue me with an IPv6 address as well as my existing IPv4 (full dual-stack), and not forcing 4-in-6 tunnelling unless the router supports that

How does DS-Lite handle this case on other ISPs?  Would #3 or #4 be hacks for users in the know to retain an IPv4 address?  Given that most users are probably oblivious, VM can likely recycle 95% of their IPv4 addresses which keeps the bean counters happy.

That's a worrying question.

One would assume that the "Modem Side" of the WhateverHubX would contain the B4 component and then just forward it on.

 So It really should be a matter of the user doing nothing, and if their router supports IPv6 then it just shows up one day, and your Ipv4 address changes but your non the wiser to it now being 4to6.

<==FibreOptic(lol)==> Hub(Modem+B4)<Solder>Hub(Router(Ipv6+Ipv4(Nat)) <--WiFi/Ethernet--> (Your network)
<==FibreOptic(lol)==> Hub(Modem+B4) <--Ethernet--> YourRouter(Ipv6+Ipv4(Nat)) <--WiFi/Ethernet--> (Your network)

No?

My understanding is that VM Ireland approaches this by not letting you turn bridge mode on.

If they do let you use your own router, then it'll need to support 464xlat. If it doesn't, then your service will be v6 only with no v4 access.

One thing seems fairly certain. That whatever kind of IPv4 over IPv6 system VM decides to give us (as that seems to be their plan), it's never going to be as good as the native IPv6 provisioned directly to our CPEs.  I expect that this will lead to many more users becoming IPv6 activists and beating on the doors of stuck-in-the-mud IPv4-only sites that are ignoring the winds of change. Start dusting off your hammers, if you haven't already. :P :-)

I know that there will be some pain involved in this evolution, but many of those IPv4-only dinosaurs won't budge until forcibly shown the asteroid of their demise. Some still won't move of course, despite our very strong encouragement, and when that is the case then I'm prepared to stop using them. There are always alternatives.

I know that some people will have the opposite view, directing their ire at Virgin Media or Liberty Global rather than at IPv4-only services, and indeed there is some merit in that view.  But note that by applying negative feedback to VM rather than to the IPv4-only services, you're merely delaying the inevitable.  Those sites will still have to extend their service to IPv6 one day, or lose your patronage eventually, or die.  It's just a matter of timing.

It'd be disappointing if VM disable modem-mode going forwards. I can see no new reason for them to do so. It would certainly give me cause to go hunting for a new ISP if they did.

Now the writing on the wall is close enough for me to read (:smileyhappy:) I've done some digging. OpenWRT has support for DS-Lite provided you install the "ds-lite" package. All that is required is the address for the AFTR either as an IPv6 address or AAAA DNS address. Once configured it sets up an ipip6 tunnel and routes IPv4 traffic down it. All pretty straight forward and pretty much the inverse of the IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel I've been running with Hurricane Electric for the past 9 years.

Getting hold of the correct AFTR address doesn't seem like rocket science even if VM are coy about publishing it.

I could imagine a diktat that domestic users must use their Superhub as router or else, but I can't see this happening with business users. They'll likely have complicated routers set up by IT staff for their business needs (VPN, etc), and I can't imagine VM would say 'bin your Cisco, you have to use our $100 Superhub'.  Or would they go fully dual-stack for business customers?

I would imagine that all DOCSIS 3.0 hubs (SH 1.0 onwards) will be fine. The move to DS-Lite and an IPv6-only network that this implies wouldn't work if they had to replace large numbers of CPE boxes. Also, I'd imagine they'll want to make the migration pretty quick (relatively speaking) when they launch this thing. Running the existing IPv4 based infrastructure alongside a parallel but unconnected IPv6 network sounds horrendous from an operations standpoint. This wouldn't sit well with a large scale CPE replacement.

A further data point on this is the approach that BT has taken. They have gone down the dual-stack approach and a large percentage of their installed CPEs cannot support IPv6 (Homehub 5.0 anyone). Given this limitation sticking with a dual-stack approach makes sense for them.

---

Optimist1 wrote:
Can existing Superhubs be upgraded with new firmware and still be OK? (I have a VMDG480, hardware version 2.00).

---

They could, but the most likely answer is that they will not.

The new DS standard is being used, and Liberty Global has designed and made their own replacement, so you should expect old equipment to be not be included.  But yea it is possible.

I would expect they wouldn't be replacing CPE, because that would be too messy. In the full-DS world, you can just turn on v6 and the v4 path is unaffected.  To go DS-Lite, you essentially need to transition a whole zone at a time.  You need a flag day where suddenly your v4 packets start being 4in6 encapsulated.  To do that piecemeal (ie commissioning N,000 new routers per day for years and dealing with all the interactions with users, technician callouts, etc) would be painful, so I imagine they're going to identify suitable models of CPE and flip the switch one day.

But that's what I was interested in - what happens to those people who don't have suitable CPE, such as those running their own routers?  What is the fallback state?  Even if it's say 2% of the VM customer base, to communicate to those users that they need to replace or reconfigure is going to be awkward so I would expect they would have a solution in the backend.  The 'solution' of users waking up one day to no IPv4 connectivity sounds like a PR disaster, so I wonder what the mitigation is?

If you think they will forward plan and replace equipment that doesn't meet the specifications then you can forget about that.  The old docsis2 modems were only removed because the network was getting beaten to death by the old gear, even then they were not all that active about wanting to change it.

In the VM world they might run both a IPv4 network and a IPv6+(4to6) together based off of your MAC.

Generally they have been good in the past about replacing old gear once a customer starts complaining.

As for a 'Fallback'... https://help.virginmedia.com/system/templates/selfservice/vm/help/customer/locale/en-GB/portal/200300000001000/article/HELP-2232/What-is-Gadget-Rescue

They will push lots of people off onto the pay service where a fix doesn't exist.

If they do let you use your own router, then it'll need to support 464xlat. If it doesn't, then your service will be v6 only with no v4 access.

Er, oops, I meant DS-lite's v4 tunnel, not 464xlat... DS-lite is a 4in6 tunnel, as opposed to 464xlat which translates v4 traffic to v6. The conclusion of having no v4 if you have no support for it is the same though.

Other Liberty Global-owned ISPs in e.g. Germany have been deploying DS-lite only to new customers, while leaving old customers on v4-only connections. If you call up and moan at them enough they can convert your new connection back to the old v4-only platform, but there's no option to simultaneously get your v6 from the new platform and your v4 from the old platform. I wouldn't be too surprised to see the same from VM; it avoids any "it used to work and now it doesn't" support calls, because the people getting DS-lite will be doing so from the start.

I predict an awful lot of "my connection was broken due to v6 and I had to get them to switch me to v4" forum posts as a result though, even though the breakage will be from the v4 being CGNATed and not from the presence of v6 :​/

@Dagger2 writes:

If you call up and moan at them enough they can convert your new connection back to the old v4-only platform, but there's no option to simultaneously get your v6 from the new platform and your v4 from the old platform.

I suspect that what Dagger2 describes may indeed be what's coming here, not only because that's the remedy which we've seen Support offer in their other jurisdictions, but also because I can't imagine Liberty Global wanting different solutions in different countries.

What Support has seemed very careful to *NOT* say whenever offering the remedy for wonky IPv4 though is "and we will remove all your IPv6 provisioning". It may be obvious to us but perhaps not to their mass audience, and it's very bad PR to make it widely known that their "solution" to poor IPv4 is to drop IPv6, whose fault it never was.

I suspect that this is going to cause them trouble, because IPv6 is not optional for anyone who doesn't have their head buried in the sand, even if they don't realize that their view of the Internet is being limited by incomplete protocol support. This may even become a topic in the general area of Net Neutrality as IPv6 deployment gets higher and higher, because more advanced protocols will be for IPv6-only rather than bringing along forever the broken cruft from IPv4. IPv6 support will not only be demanded, but expected and required, and losing it to fix IPv4 will be seen as nothing short of laughable. Simply not an option.

There is one thing that's puzzling me though. Having gone through all of this pain in order to gain the huge advantages of IPv6-only internal infrastructure, why would Virgin/LibG retain IPv4 internally at all? This seems odd. I'd guess that their so-called "solution" to IPv4 shortcomings will last only until their internal IPv6-only transition is completed, and after that anyone wanting a non-broken IPv4 will be offered some kind of extra-cost service, or left without remedy. The default kind of IPv4 is likely to be the 4-over-6 tunneled one for good once they're IPv6-only internally, even if their actual IPv4 provisioning protocol used does evolve over time.

Morgaine.

Morgaine

The thing is ISP's can't abandon IPv4 completely until the rest of the internet has caught up.

Note that there's also signs that at least one country has regressed in terms of IPv6 adoption, possibly precisely because they initially chose a bad transition method.

Take a look at this.

https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the-internet-report/state-of-the-internet-ipv6-adoption-visualization.jsp

The UK appears to be further along with IPv6 deployment than Ireland - Yet if we look at the graphs we see something profoundly disturbing.

Lets look at the UK

While there have been slight declines in IPv6 adoption at times, we have on the whole a steady increase to where we are today.

But the graph showing Irelands IPv6 adoption is really mindboggling.

We have a rise to a high of 60.7% followed by a couple of slight declines and then a crash to 1.6% adoption.

On the plus side, following that we see a steady increase back to the 15.9% adoption we have today, but to me the crash is significant, now I may be reading this wrong altogether, but to me this suggests that someone decided that the state of play with IPv6 adoption was so broken that they decided to pull the plug and start again.  Although without further data on the individual companies over time it's hard to pull anything definite from the graph.

One of the major factors in IPv6 adoption is always going to be how it affects the end user.  A good transition is one where the end user sees little or no negative affect on their internet experience, a bad transition is one that affects their experience negatively.

So what can go wrong with DS-lite.

Streaming - on the whole if we're streaming FROM an IPv4 or IPv6 enabled site, we're not going to see much difference.  Netflix, Youtube, and others already support native IPv6 (although Netflix have declared war on he.net IPv6 tunnels :()  Given the state of IPv4 adoption around the world they're still going to have to cater for IPv4 for some time yet.

However people running solutions where they stream from a home connection MAY be impacted depending on the server software used.

Plex - for example while providing limited connectivity over IPv6 (If you connect directly using a web browser), still does not support native IPv6 for their apps, and the plex.tv website itself is, at time of writing IPv4 only.  While I don't have a full handle on how it works, the server needs a public IPv4 address otherwise it reports it's not reachable from the internet.

Plex themselves have developed a workaround that caters for situations such as DS-Lite, where the server is reachable indirectly via servers at the parent company, however this is a kludge fix, that does limit the streaming bandwidth, a better solution would have been to fully embrace IPv6 in both server and client.

Social Media - Again many of the social media giants already support IPv6, and while I note people like facebook have professed a desire to move to IPv6 only, given the state of IPv6 adoption, it's likely they'll have to keep IPv4 access for a while yet, however it should still be possible to have IPv4 on the edge transtition to a totally internal IPv6 network.

Gaming - by far one of the biggest impacts is going to be for gaming software.  Again the state of play is depressing, if you look at the network settings in many games, you'll see that IPv6 provision is low, even the XBox one - which professes to work best in an IPv6 environment actually moans under native IPv6 if it can't get a Teredo address.  The Playstation 4 fares worse in that Sony have only recently added IPv6 support to the operating system this year.

Even if the gaming platform supports IPv6 - UNLESS THE GAMES DO, then we are no further along, and here is where people will really struggle under DS-Lite with users getting Strict NAT all the time and asking to go back to IPv4 as their gaming experience now sucks.

Home Security Solutions - Now here's another area that's going to be affected by the capabilities of the hardware that's installed.  If your solution dials out to a remote server, then in reality you shouldn't be affected, but many home solutions don't do this, they act as servers themselves, if the solution supports IPv6 then all is well and good (provided you are able to secure it), however if the hardware only supports IPv4 - then under DS-Lite it will become unreachable again with users wanting to go back to IPv4.

In short your transition method must cater for these issues, otherwise it's doomed to fail.

Tim

@ravenstar68:

I think you may have misread what someone said. As far as I know, *NOBODY* has ever suggested switching off all IPv4 access, and I certainly didn't. It would be suicidal (currently), at least in our western part of the Internet, since around 75% of it still runs exclusively over IPv4.

Speaking for myself, I was reporting only on the well-publicized fact that major Internet companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft are heading as fast as they possibly can towards IPv6-only infrastructure internally, and I've always qualified it with that word, INTERNALLY. Needless to say, they retain as much IPv4 connectivity under these internal migration plans as they need, but the only IPv4 infrastructure that they retain resides at the edges of their AS.

Under the understanding that nobody at all is talking about abandoning IPv4 connectivity (yet), all four of your categories need to be revisited, since they all address the disaster that would occur if IPv4 connectivity were simply cut off. (You seem to be implying that IPv4 through DS-Lite doesn't work at all in all those common cases.)  Well that total loss of IPv4 just isn't happening, under anyone's plans. :-)

And it's certainly not happening under VM's known or assumed plans. Quite the opposite --- from the little we know, they seem to be retaining native IPv4 provisioning as an option, which surprises me because it negates the only good reason for choosing DS-Lite, namely getting them close to IPv6-only internally.

I'm no fan of DS-Lite, and I've described several times how I would have phased this IPv6 rollout differently, starting with Dual Stack for minimum disruption and easiest evolution.  But I do recognize that DS-Lite has a role later in allowing ISPs to turn off their legacy IPv4 equipment and to grow beyond the limits of IPv4, which Dual Stack cannot do.

Morgaine.

A short postscript to the above ...

It needs to be recognized that a few things are NEVER going to work except through natively provisioned IPv4. Those few things have a short shelf life and a grim future, because ISPs aren't going to keep spending money on dual stack hardware and on the manpower to maintain it, nor to endure more than twice the security headache for very long, just to satisfy a few edge cases.

If you have one of those legacy applications, in due course your choices will be either to replace it with another solution that isn't quite so restrictive, or to employ a service that gives you native IPv4 access by some other means.  A few may decide that they prefer to look back rather than to look forward and so will move to another ISP that matches their requirement better, and that's perfectly fine.  But it would be odd to expect Virgin to fill that role.

Short version:  A few legacy applications that neither work with IPv6 nor with tunneled IPv4 are best replaced by more modern ones. To keep them working in a world that is moving to IPv6 will cost you extra money, some effort, and probably considerable aggravation.

Just because some people are still using a product does not mean that it will still be supported.  At various times when upgrading my PC I have had to replace other pieces of kit as well because the appropriate driver software was no longer available, such as printers and digital cameras.

So I cannot see ISPs continuing to spend money on supporting legacy IPv4 once the vast majority of their customers are happily using the new standard.  Customers will either have to ditch their outdated kit switch to alternative ISPs.

VM definitely need to keep assigning unique IPV4 addresses to their customers hubs, even with IPV6 enabled. Shared IPV4 is a nightmare for many reasons. You can't host, can't game properly when games need port forwarding. And if someone else behind the shared IP does dodgy things they would end up getting everyone behind that IP banned along with them, GG.

VM have no problems with IPV4, all they need to do is toggle on IPV6 along side without doing any IPV4 adjustments.

Morgaine

I wasn't talking about switching IPv4 off completely.

However I can say that DS-Lite will cause users problems, you see users will no longer have a unique public IPv4 address, instead the B4 element on the users router will have a private WAN v4 address.  From the B4 element the connection is then tunneled over IPv6 to the AFTR element where it is passed to the local gateway and then gets a public IPv6 address that is shared with multiple users. i.e. CGNAT

So now we have double NAT - once on the router to translate from the LAN to the WAN IPv4 and once at the gateway to translate from private to public CGNAT address.

So what'll happen?

No port forwarding, either manual or automatic (via UPnP)
Strict NAT for all gaming consoles which means no one can host games - bye bye multiplayer in many cases.  Games hosted on external public servers run by the major companies should be unaffected (so you should still be able to play WoW and Diablo as well as the Call of Duty games and Elder Scrolls online)
No Teredo for XBox one.
You want to access a home security solution over IPv4 from outside your network - forget it.
You want to work from home over IPv4 - it may be possible, but if your employer won't be able to guarantee that only you can connect if he filters by IPv4 address.

People who are merely consumers of IPv4 services i.e. who only surf and stream from the internet will be unaffected as double NAT won't affect these services.

If Virgin Media does roll out DS-Lite these boards are going to be fun.

Tim

ravenstar68 if they did do a public rollout like that I'd be posting ASAP to be reverted back to IPV4 only.

I could are less about IPV6, the whole attitude of "ooh, IPV6, SHINY, roll it out." Is like the people who demanded 4K content from VM two years when 4K is only a temp stop before 8K tvs and no provider had any 4K content either. Aka the 'early adopters' only thinking of their base line, not the bigger picture.

What matters to me is ease of accessibility plus ease of hosting your own things. Right now that is best done over IPV4 with your own unique IPV4 assigned and that's not going to change for a very long time (talking 6+ years easily here.)

See I do think we need IPv6 rolled out.  At the moment we're in a chicken and the egg situation.  ISP's don't want to roll it out as there's no incentive and many game and hardware manufacturers haven't included it because ISP's don't provide it.

I will repeat what I've said previously, IPv6 rollout should have been done LONG BEFORE we neared the point of IPv4 exhaustion.  At that time the two protocols could have theoretically been run side by side with an aim to phasing out IPv4 much sooner,  While I can understand the logistics of ISP's running pure dual stack would be a nightmare, a better solution would be to have a transition mechanism that puts a public IPv4 address on the B4 element.

The overall connection could still be tunnelled over IPv6 to the AFTR  element but there would be no double NAT involved.

Tim