IPv6 support on Virgin media

Well, the count is definitely climbing on a daily basis. I suspect by tonight it will hit the 17k mark. Quite what that means is anybodies business as some of the previous graphs look like my bank balance after the wife has got hold of my debit card!!

---

louis-m wrote:

Well, the count is definitely climbing on a daily basis. I suspect by tonight it will hit the 17k mark. Quite what that means is anybodies business as some of the previous graphs look like my bank balance after the wife has got hold of my debit card!!

---

I agree with the graph vs wife with debit card :smileyvery-happy:.

I would also like to place a bet of 50p that the switch has been flipped. I wonder what the odds are.....

@TonyJr writes:

I would also like to place a bet of 50p that the switch has been flipped. I wonder what the odds are.....

Regarding CG-NAT, sure they're going to do that? Could be using IP-in-IP?

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2473

Would require a horrendous amount of resources running everyone through a NAPT AFTR.

Lightweight 4over6 might be a plan, too, can present public IPv4 addresses.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7596

@Ignition:  A few related points:

• Liberty Global running DS-Lite in all of their countries but something different in UK seems extremely unlikely.

• How IPv4 is provisioned within a native IPv6 deployment doesn't affect the IPv6 numbers that we're seeing.

• I think it's a reasonable guess that Liberty Global / Virgin beancounters will be going for the least costly option.

• DS-Lite provides the cost and support benefits of IPv6-only internal infrastructure, plus IPv4-As-A-Service later.

• Deploying DS-Lite now would allow them to profit from their excess IPv4 addresses before world prices tumble.

Given the above, I don't expect Liberty Global's IPv6 deployment in UK to be any different than elsewhere.

Thanks for the detailed response!

Other LG-owned ISPs that have done v6 do it by adding a new v6+DS-lite platform, and then putting new customers only on it. If VM go the same route, then we should expect to see about 2000 new v6 users per day (at 5 million customers and a 15% churn rate). We aren't seeing anything like that at the moment.

Will they go the same route? I don't think we'll see them switch existing customers to CGNAT, and since they'll likely be tying CGNAT and v6 together (again based on every other LG-owned ISP in other countries doing exactly that) I think that probably means they'll be doing the new-customers-only thing too. So we won't see any big jumps as PoPs go online because the existing customers on those PoPs would need to cancel and sign up again first.

Hard to see that their configuration profiles would allow for a split like that.  It would seem more logical, but this is VM we have here, Logical would have been to roll out a non-nat solution years ago and then tackle Ipv4 exhaustion when it happens.

I am thinking we'll see it more along the lines of switch everyone over to CGNat, then (as mentioned) sell non-nat as a service add-on.

I don't think they'll sell it as a service add on.

What others seem to have done e.g. UPS (Now Virgin Media Ireland) and Ziggo, is moved everyone onto IPv6 and then offered those that ask rollbacks to IPv4.

I can see that happening here as well.

Tim

It's a pity that we don't know for sure (officially) which approach Liberty Global used in other jurisdictions.  It's reasonable to assume that whatever they did elsewhere they'll do in the UK too.

Lacking that information, I think I'll cast my guess with @ravenstar68, because the *FAT* long tail of IPv4 that would result if IPv6 were given automatically only to new customers makes no sense to me. The fat long tail would have the following disadvantages:

• By needing to keep all of their existing IPv4 resources around, it wouldn't let Virgin move rapidly to IPv6-only internal infrastructure. That would be very bad for them since VM would lose the large savings in cost, manpower, equipment and reduced headache / security risk which provide most of the corporate incentive for ISPs to move fast to IPv6-only internally.

• It wouldn't give Virgin any information about how many IPv4 blocks can be freed up for selling off while the market price of IPv4 addresses is high. The loss of that easy one-off windfall does not seem very strategic, and for a profit-motivated company, unlikely.

• It would waste the high degree of compatibility and operational transparency of the two protocols, which for most common applications are completely interchangeable and work fine side by side. Most users wouldn't notice the change at all, giving Virgin a quick win.  Losing that low-hanging fruit would delay their IPv6 transition plans and burden them with high costs for a long period, a very high price to pay.

Transitioning to IPv6 with a long IPv6 tail is a very bad package deal, so I expect Virgin / Liberty Global to switch everyone over at once, and then roll back to native IPv4 (without IPv6) for the relatively few who want it. Trickling out IPv6 is such a bad package deal that it's never even mentioned as an IPv6 deployment M.O. --- the normal use of "long tail" is to refer to the long tail of legacy IPv4, slowly fading away into the sunset as IPv4-only equipment dies or is modernized.

PS. "IPv4-as-a-Service" (in the sense of an extra revenue stream for ISPs) is only ever mooted as a long-term goal, an option that becomes viable only after IPv4 usage has become niche. It's unlikely to affect the decision process for present-day ISPs when considering how best to transition to an IPv6 world, because a niche IPv4 is beyond the visible horizon.

Morgaine.

I wonder if older routers will work with it.

And what percentage of customers are on the latest one.

@andrewducker writes:

I wonder if older routers will work with it.

Makes sense. I'm on A Superhub 2,which is presumably therefore compatible.

I'm (obviously) on IPV4, but 40 miles from me someone with the same kit is on IPV6. IPV4 is offered as an option

I would assume thats the model VM will use, as you know, they already are as LG

---

Morgaine wrote:

@andrewducker writes:

I wonder if older routers will work with it.

 

That'll depend on how old the equipment is, but Virgin is probably well positioned in that respect by now, because over the last few years they have imposed on customers a mandatory free CPE upgrade with no alternative offered other than to leave VM.  I was caught up in this mass upgrade so I'm describing this first-hand.

The fact that it was a free upgrade says a lot about how important the mass upgrade was to Virgin.  The forced upgrade wasn't necessarily driven by the need to support IPv6 of course, as new equipment allows them to offer new services to customers with upgraded CPEs.  Nevertheless, being compatible with their IPv6 plans was almost certainly a side effect of the upgrades.

Morgaine.

---

You can reject some of their upgrades.  For instance, I rejected the SH3 three times now.  My 2ac seemed to be dying before I went away in December, but since I have returned it all seems okay  (must have not been the modem).

I would have thought that the ability to brag with the slightly better AC WiFi AND the "Virgin Media" public WiFi is the main reason they want to push the newer gear out.  The larger channel groups that can be bonded should help with utilization too I would think.

Users with older routers shouldn't worry too much at this stage I don't think.  By the time IPv6 deployment happens you will have gone through two more sets of routers ;P.

on ‎27-03-2010 18:11

---

louis-m wrote:

IPv6 support on Virgin media

on ‎27-03-2010 18:11

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

As mentioned..... post almost 9 years ago!

Now we're just about to hit the 18000 mark on the IPv6 counter in this thread which roughly equates to about 5.610 addresses per day since this thread was started! OMG, I need to get a life and go and watch some paint dry!

---

Probably "next year", in line with what VM have been hinting for several years now, and I expect to continue to do indefinitely.

Sunday 13/1/19 = 18404 tick tock, tick tock

Today's is the highest daily increment of recent times, and it follow a pretty high (though not record) Saturday too:

==========  ====== ========== ========== ===== ========= ======
DATE        AS     Users      IPv6-Users %UKv6 Increment %ISPv6
==========  ====== ========== ========== ===== ========= ======
2019_01_07: VIRGIN 10,560,952     17,065  0.10       278   0.16
2019_01_08: VIRGIN 10,565,590     17,167  0.10       102   0.16
2019_01_09: VIRGIN 10,559,118     17,396  0.10       229   0.16
2019_01_10: VIRGIN 10,558,475     17,499  0.10       103   0.17
2019_01_11: VIRGIN 10,552,087     17,667  0.10       168   0.17
2019_01_12: VIRGIN 10,540,417     17,992  0.11       325   0.17
2019_01_13: VIRGIN 10,542,576     18,507  0.11       515   0.18

The +515 is a record increment since the latter half of 2018, taking VM's IPv6 usage to the record daily of 18,507 counts.  It should be stressed though that one or two days of high valued samples does not carry any real statistical significance.  Just to put it in context, here is the plot of daily increments over the time that I've been recording APNIC data for the UK:

As this plot shows, we've experienced much higher daily increments in the past, as well as very large daily drops, so don't read too much into such incremental changes until they begin to persist over a period. :)

Morgaine.

Tuesday 15/1/19 = 19147 still on the up.....

I've just been watching the UK IPv6 Council's annual meeting video update from Virgin: https://youtu.be/16FdlxyFQgY?t=1302

It adds a bit of colour to the slides which were posted a month or so back. Their representative was an engineer and clearly not permitted to represent the wider business but it was clear that he was keen and that they are technically able to launch as soon as possible.

The big downside came in the Q/A at the end of his presentation. It seems that there is much debate about Modem Mode within VM. There is a strong chance that when IPv6 is rolled out that Modem Mode will not be permitted any more. The reasoning being that not many devices exist that support DS-Lite and that the end-user experience would be very poor as a result. This is extremely disappointing to say the least.

"Enthusiast" firewalls OpenWRT and pfSense all support DS-Lite just fine and from a cursory search so do routers from Linksys and TP-Link. That said the state of documentation is currently pitiful so I have some sympathy with the anti-MM voices within VM. Surely this is a chicken-and-egg situation though and if VM permitted MM the state of documentation, device firmware and community assistance would evolve. I'd be quite happy if VM denied any support to people who enable Modem Mode.

Would modem mode matter here? You would simply put give your router an IPv6 address and then distribute from there. I don't see it being too big an issue.

---

Anonymous wrote:

I've just been watching the UK IPv6 Council's annual meeting video update from Virgin: https://youtu.be/16FdlxyFQgY?t=1302

"Enthusiast" firewalls OpenWRT and pfSense all support DS-Lite just fine and from a cursory search so do routers from Linksys and TP-Link. That said the state of documentation is currently pitiful so I have some sympathy with the anti-MM voices within VM. Surely this is a chicken-and-egg situation though and if VM permitted MM the state of documentation, device firmware and community assistance would evolve. I'd be quite happy if VM denied any support to people who enable Modem Mode.

---

Not real sure who the guy is, LinkedIn seems to suggest he's a principal design engineer, but Virgin tend to have a lot of people giving a lot of views and none of them ever seem to be official.  What he described is moving everything to a core Ipv6 network before the switch ever happens, I think Morgaine has given that as a likely core goal and as such seems to be correct.

I think that Virgin not having modem mode could be a mistake.  The problem will be in the way that the ALG and Firewall functions work more than a multiple-nat layer issue.  If your under CGNAT then an extra layer of NAT isn't going to hurt anything, drop your router WAN the IPv4 DMZ and It's hard to see any extra issues being caused by that, just overactive ALG/Firewall problems with the VM Gateway equipment.

It's not so much of a Chicken and Egg thing either.  I say that because Virgin Media as a whole is quite small when it comes to users who will be looking for firmware upgrades from router manufactures.  Nearly every major home router maker supports DSLite on some equipment, so if they wanted to that feature could be added in today.  What I suspect will happen is that non-enterprise equipment will not see firmware upgrades to deal with DSLite as it possibly could be used as a feature component to be marketed to people.  But there's another side to this, once the world moves to IPv6 then IPv4 will be useless, so it's a feature that will probably be removed before it's ever as good as it could be.

There might not be a huge problem with CGNat (DSLite) here in the UK.  Virgin have waited so long that by the time IPv6 rolls out on their network, all connections from outside VM will be IPv6 enabled.  I personally have hardware that will never be IPv6 unless it's replaced (Solar Inverter, SIP VoIP Phone).  Nintendo have clung on to IPv4 only devices for far too long now, so a lot of those users are really going to feel the pain.  I would imagine that security cameras and media streamers will be a big issue for a lot of people too.

I think CGNAT will cause issues for those users that want to supply their own services eg serve up http/s for their own use.

Yes, you could argue that they shouldn't be doing it on dynamic IP's etc but most consumer grade routers have dynamic DNS to overcome this and allow consumers to serve up what they want.

From my understanding, CGNAT will prevent this unless each customer is mapped to a unique IPv4 public IP address. Yes, for most users who don't do this, they won't see any difference apart from any CGNAT teething problems.

This is why I think that for users who want the ability to serve up their own services ie accept incoming IPv4 connections, VM will charge them a premium by forcing them to switch to something like business and use a GRE tunnel etc to tunnel an IPv4 network via the IPv6 network. Alternatively, they could use an outside provider for this.... again at a cost.

So my guess is they will rollout IPv6 with CGNAT for IPv4 at no extra cost for residential users. If you want anything more exotic, you will have to pay a premium for it or go elsewhere. I suspect the vanilla user will see no difference and hence there won't be a mass migration of consumers due to the CGNAT limitations.

It will be interesting to see what they do for the business users, especially on the Voom side of things. These users currently use a GRE tunnel to separate their traffic from the consumer side of things and allow a specific IPv4 subnet to be supplied to the end user with full NAT as it is now.
With those users, I suspect the GRE tunnel will still be supplied (at no extra cost) and the endpoint IP's will simply change to IPv6.

Taking the above into account, I suspect that anybody on residential VM who want's full IPv4 NAT after the switch to IPv6, will be forced to switch to Virgin Business or something similar at a premium to retain the same capabilities.

---

louis-m wrote:

Would modem mode matter here? You would simply put give your router an IPv6 address and then distribute from there. I don't see it being too big an issue.

---

If you are happy with the SuperHub firewall and its rules and whatever limited prefix delegation (likely just a single /64) it would provide then this might work for you.

For me I want a plain Ethernet connection with plain DHCP provided IPv4 /32 (as now) or DHCPv6/SLAAC provided IPv6 /56 (in the future). I'll provide the firewall in the same way I provide the locks on my house. If others are happy with a US multinational providing the locks on their house then on their head be it.

If Virgin can't or won't continue to deliver this service then I'll seek another provider even if it means going slower for a bit (my BT pole hasn't been upgraded to G.Fast yet).