IPv6 support on Virgin media

Although it's useful to know roughly how many IPv4 addresses Virgin has available, I doubt that it matters at all in terms of deployments, because the vast majority are sure to be sold off while the market price is high --- currently around $18 per single address, I read.  The attraction is irresistible, and cashing in on it is made somewhat urgent by knowing that the price will plummet once IPv6 is the majority protocol and IPv4-based companies start bringing up IPv6 in panic.

Unlike many non-ISP companies out there, all ISPs know that IPv6 is creeping up on them even if they haven't yet deployed it to customers, and for an ISP it is not a viable option not to deploy if they want to stay relevant.  Alas for an ISP, running dual stacks internally is about as welcome as a hole in the head, so they also know that their long-term direction is towards IPv6-only internally plus IPv4 gateways at the edge for backwards compatibility.

There will be exceptions to this appealing organization of course.  Quite a few ISP businesses fill a specialist niche rather than the mass public one, and some will find a good role supporting the long tail and extra costs of IPv4.  Not the mass public ISPs though --- it's far too painful and costly in terms of both manpower and equipment for them to do so.  Even worse for the medium term, it limits the speed at which they can evolve.

And so, while I like having numbers and stats on everything, I think that the number of IPv4 addresses at Virgin's disposal will mainly determine the extra profit that will appear on their ledger from the sell-off of excess IPv4 address blocks.  An estimate of the IPv4 addresses that they will need overall is probably well known to them (current session stats minus the number of IPv6-capable destinations), but how many they will need to satisfy those IPv4 users who can neither move to IPv6 services nor use tunneled IPv4 is an extremely hard estimation to make with any confidence.

One thing is certain though --- the number of people unavoidably tied to native IPv4 can only decrease with time, and that is probably a very welcome realization for Virgin.  It means that they can err on the side of retaining fewer rather than too many IPv4 addresses, because time will heal any miscalculation.

Another interesting conclusion is that Virgin is probably quite eager to release IPv6 onto us so that they can know with accuracy how many IPv4 addresses they definitely cannot sell off at this point in time.  Factor in a safety margin and the rest of their IPv4 blocks are pure profit.  Clearly the earlier they know their numbers the better. :-)

Morgaine.