IPv6 support on Virgin media
Does anyone know whether (and if so when) Virgin plan to implement IPv6 on its network?
Forum Discussion
Sunday update --- the Virgin Media IPv6 growth curve continued over the Xmas / New Year period:
Today's sample count for VM stands at 16,787 per day.
So, here we are, 2019 and still no IPv6. It would be nice to think that the release of an IPv6 service is imminent, but Virgin has ignored our hopes so many times before. If anyone sees other indications that something is stirring in the wings, it would be nice to hear your thoughts.
Morgaine.
Sunday update --- and the rise in VM IPv6 counts continues, APNIC permitting.
If anyone is counting the weeks between my (usually) fortnightly graphs, they'll have noticed that the last one failed to appear on schedule. There was a good reason for that: APNIC had a little hiccup on the 19th January, and its data became questionable.
Being an engineer, data capture and analysis is stock-in-trade, and so is watching out for data anomalies. One such anomaly is common-mode changes in variables that are considered independent, which usually indicates that there is a problem with the data capture or its transmission. In some situations it is possible to perform Common-Mode Rejection to recover the wanted data safely by removal of the common-mode contribution, as long as certain conditions are met. I gathered another week of daily samples to check, but unfortunately the required conditions are not met. We're going to have to live with this glitch in the curves, a valuable reminder that indirect proxy measurements are often less robust than direct ones.
The following graph shows the signed magnitude of the increments in each day's sample value relative to the day before, for all four of the UK ISPs monitored, starting one month before the anomaly for reference. Virgin Media's curve appears as a straight line hugging the x-axis because VM increments are dwarfed by the common scale and much larger increments of the other three, but the same anomaly is apparent in VM data when examined at a smaller scale. Namely: on 19th January 2019, APNIC's IPv6 counts for all four ISPs dropped simultaneously by a large factor (negative increment), and remained low for four days:
By itself, this large drop would not have prevented Common-Mode Rejection and data recovery, but unfortunately after the equally sudden rise 4 days later, none of the curves showed that the increments masked by the 4-day common-mode drop had accumulated to provide continuity after the common-mode fault ended. As a result, continuity is missing and cannot be recovered by interpolation across the fault. We are in effect in a new data sequence now: the measurement apparatus has changed.
Here is the current graph for all four ISPs, visually suggesting a common-mode fault and loss of statistical continuity with the data before the event:
And finally, our usual plot of Virgin's IPv6 activity at finer resolution:
Fortunately the continuity remaining in the curves is easily sufficient for eyeballing purposes (it could have been *much* worse), so APNIC's hiccup hasn't altered our ballpark analysis. IPv6 activity is clearly still at the highest level ever seen in Virgin's AS5089 and is still growing, so we can be confident that something interesting is happening.
Today's IPv6 sample count for VM stands at 20,531 per day.
Morgaine.
21369 - 30/1/19 ..... another 1k jump so increasing a bit again.
21369 - 30/1/19
Can anyone estimate how much the change to IPv6 will cost VM?
Then I can guess how much this is likely to put up the monthly cost, since you may be sure it won't come out of their profits.
jpeg1 wrote:Can anyone estimate how much the change to IPv6 will cost VM?
Then I can guess how much this is likely to put up the monthly cost, since you may be sure it won't come out of their profits.
No one can estimate that.
If you go back 10-15 years the cost was averaged out at like $2 per US customer cost to the ISP and $340 (10 year) cost to the customer of the ISP. You do need to keep in mind tho that a large chunk of that $340 was down to new hardware and most of that old hardware has been replaced by now too. Now Virgin (and many other network providers) are faced with the fact that they are being forced down the CGNAT path. CGNAT will probably have a larger cost than IPv6. According to ComCast, buying IPv4 addresses are more expensive than the total cost of Deploying IPv6. In essence, they have no choice, and their no choice solution is also the best value one too. (Hmmm.... 4exit, NATtemain, More4ain)....
Will VM put their cost up.... Yea, They will find some way to charge us more for it than it cost them (In training, hardware, and software). When I phoned retention's a couple of days ago they kept telling me how my service level really dictated the number of "devices" my network could run. Based on that then I can only assume they have yet to start any actual training on anything of value. I argued that DSL gave me a higher upload speed than Virgin Media, he said that Virgin Media would be more ideal for more devices. Can't wait to see how they "sell" IPv6 to us. You can be sure that it's not going to be good, nor cheap.
Deploying v6 is a one-time cost, whereas CGNAT is a never-ending ongoing cost. Deploying v6 will save them money. (It helps that something around 40-70% of the traffic on a dual-stack ISP goes over v6, which lowers the CGNAT cost if you have v6 available.)
What does that mean for the monthly cost? Obviously that'll continue to go up by however much they think the market can bear. The only impact that costs have on pricing is to set a minimum viable lower bound, but that's only relevant if there's enough competition to force the prices down to that level.
I don't think VM will charge you directly for the IPv6 implementation eg your monthly charge is going up to X because of IPv6.
What they will do is charge indirectly ie we've kept our prices low for x amount of years but now we have to increase it by X due to rising costs etc
As I've mentioned in this thread, I think the standard user will be chucked onto IPv6 with IPv4 CGNAT and if you want anything different, you will have to pay extra ie IPv6 with IPv4 Statics & Full NAT
@jpeg1 writes:
Can anyone estimate how much the change to IPv6 will cost VM?
Then I can guess how much this is likely to put up the monthly cost, since you may be sure it won't come out of their profits.
That would have been an interesting question to ask if Virgin existed in a vacuum, a world in which external factors did not affect them, a world in which they could have continued providing only IPv4 indefinitely so that IPv6 would amount to "an extra service". But that is not the case here, because such a world does not exist.A better question to ask in the real world of today would be how much money have Virgin already lost by being so late to the IPv6 game, since late panic deployment is always more costly than doing things early and in risk-free baby steps. Also, how many opportunities to leap ahead competitively have they squandered, and what risks have they now heaped upon themselves by not having IPv6 rolled out half a decade ago, or at least the instant that Liberty Global had a plan ready for it.
Last but not least, how much money has Virgin lost by refusing to listen (let alone talk) to its customers who have orders of magnitude more technical experience of networking than any VM manager, judging by the evidence we've seen over the years. It was a resource which cost them nothing yet would have cost a fortune to obtain through contracted Professional Services, but which they deliberately chose to ignore.
In summary, talking about costs is important for a business, but knowing what the costs would be in a non-existent fantasy world doesn't really help much. Lots of things could have happened in an alternative universe, but did not materialize in this one.
The question which is closest to the present reality which might be worth entertaining is "How much extra will IPv4 be costing Virgin in a few years' time, given that they are on the path towards having IPv6-only internal infrastructure? (Deploying IPv4 only at the edges.)" That's a highly relevant question which large numbers of companies are already asking themselves, often publicly in presentations. There is no reasonable doubt that IPv4-as-a-Service is coming, and it will cost its users more and more over time for the simple reason that it is a heavy and unwanted burden in a world that is inexorably moving to IPv6.
Morgaine.
Definitely agree with that. I'm on VMB Voom 3 and the minute IPv6 is available, I will be configuring it. I'd imagine they will leave the GRE tunnel serving up my static IPv4's as it is now and then at some stage in the future (in a galaxy far far away), I wouldn't be surprised if they informed me they were closing down the IPv4 service and to keep it you would have to pay X. Hopefully by that time, the rest of the world will be well on their way to IPv6 and I can bin the IPv4.
I do think the change to IPv6 will be more imminently evident to residential users as they will be switched to IPv6 and IPv4 CGNAT. Maybe VM will allow residential users (for a limited period) to switch back to IPv4 to gain full NAT or force them onto a new (and slightly more costly) tariff?
04/02/19 = 22045 over 22k now and still climbing!
- How accurate are those figures? What does "user" mean? An IPV6 address? If so, the whole 128 bits, or just the routeable 64?
@Optimist1 asked:
How accurate are those figures? What does "user" mean? An IPV6 address? If so, the whole 128 bits, or just the routeable 64?
The figures are counts of IP addresses actually observed by APNIC, so APNIC's column heading of "V6 Users (est)" is just shorthand for something more complex. It's not too bad for general public consumption but perhaps a bit misleading.
APNIC's measurements are formally proxies, in science/engineering terminology. I wrote a longish post about them in message 476 of this thread back in April 2018, based on a response I made in the UK IPv6 Council group at LinkedIn:
The question about accuracy is interesting. The accuracy is very dependent on what you're actually trying to measure, since proxies can have a complex relationship to the desired (but hidden) quantity. In engineering terms, the figures have relatively low accuracy because of the very indirect method of measurement and the many things that affect the process. However, their precision can be very high for ISPs that have IPv6 user populations in the millions, since that provides APNIC with very robust statistical populations.
(As a perfect example of very high precision but quite low accuracy, just remember the recent common-mode fault in APNIC measurements that I described in message 750. APNICs figures are very precise for Sky and BT, yet for several days their accuracy and utility as proxies got badly disconnected from the quantity that we're trying to track --- low accuracy.)
In Virgin's case, both the accuracy and the precision are rather low, since the relationship between the proxy measurements and IPv6 user counts is highly uncertain without a public IPv6 release, and the statistical population for their IPv6 counts is pretty low too.
It's worth noting that IPv6 provides end-to-end connectivity from each client device, whereas residential IPv4 users are given a single IPv4 address and all of their devices appear publicly as that single address coming out of their CPE's NAT. Consequently, publicly observed addresses are usually proportional to account numbers for IPv4, but proportional to device numbers for IPv6, which is why APNIC IPv6 counts are typically larger than actual user counts. Proxies are very valuable in the absence of direct data, but one has to tie down what they represent to gain the most benefit from them.
Morgaine.
Optimist1 wrote:
How accurate are those figures? What does "user" mean? An IPV6 address? If so, the whole 128 bits, or just the routeable 64?There's a good presentation on how APNIC do it and what they measure here:
https://conference.apnic.net/44/assets/files/APCS549/Measuring-IPv6-using-Ad-based-Measurement.pdf
The TLDR is they use a random sample of adverts and the IPv4 and IPv6 responses across a given geography (Europe, Northe America,etc). The specific IPv4/IPv6 addresses are unimportant outside of classification of which ISP the sample corresponds to. User samples are separated by their unique advertising tracking ID. The samples are then scaled by the ITU figures for Internet users in a given country. The numbers aren't intended or possible to be accurate.
louis-m wrote:<snip>I do think the change to IPv6 will be more imminently evident to residential users as they will be switched to IPv6 and IPv4 CGNAT. Maybe VM will allow residential users (for a limited period) to switch back to IPv4 to gain full NAT or force them onto a new (and slightly more costly) tariff?
I think Liberty Global in Ireland already give "gamers" the choice of reverting back to IPv4 so they can maintain NAT and I don't think they charge for this.
However I can see this as a cash cow for VM, given the amount of avid gamers who post on these Forums ........
Anonymous wrote:Optimist1 wrote:
How accurate are those figures? What does "user" mean? An IPV6 address? If so, the whole 128 bits, or just the routeable 64?There's a good presentation on how APNIC do it and what they measure here:
https://conference.apnic.net/44/assets/files/APCS549/Measuring-IPv6-using-Ad-based-Measurement.pdf
The TLDR is they use a random sample of adverts and the IPv4 and IPv6 responses across a given geography (Europe, Northe America,etc). The specific IPv4/IPv6 addresses are unimportant outside of classification of which ISP the sample corresponds to. User samples are separated by their unique advertising tracking ID. The samples are then scaled by the ITU figures for Internet users in a given country. The numbers aren't intended or possible to be accurate.
Thank you for that explanation, @davefiddes!
Adduxi wrote:
louis-m wrote:<snip>I do think the change to IPv6 will be more imminently evident to residential users as they will be switched to IPv6 and IPv4 CGNAT. Maybe VM will allow residential users (for a limited period) to switch back to IPv4 to gain full NAT or force them onto a new (and slightly more costly) tariff?
I think Liberty Global in Ireland already give "gamers" the choice of reverting back to IPv4 so they can maintain NAT and I don't think they charge for this.
However I can see this as a cash cow for VM, given the amount of avid gamers who post on these Forums ........
Does this reversion to ipv4 lose the ipv6 side? is it one or the other?
fyonn wrote:
Adduxi wrote:
louis-m wrote:<snip>I do think the change to IPv6 will be more imminently evident to residential users as they will be switched to IPv6 and IPv4 CGNAT. Maybe VM will allow residential users (for a limited period) to switch back to IPv4 to gain full NAT or force them onto a new (and slightly more costly) tariff?
I think Liberty Global in Ireland already give "gamers" the choice of reverting back to IPv4 so they can maintain NAT and I don't think they charge for this.
However I can see this as a cash cow for VM, given the amount of avid gamers who post on these Forums ........
Does this reversion to ipv4 lose the ipv6 side? is it one or the other?
AFAIK, it gives the user an IPv4 address only, so that NAT for gaming is not affected. That's my understanding anyway.
I suppose I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but... having v6 doesn't break existing games. Games that don't support it will just ignore it.
VM in Ireland use DS-lite, which means that in addition to getting v6, your v4 gets CGNATed. It's the CGNAT that's the problem, not the v6 -- in fact the v6 is the solution to the problems the CGNAT causes.
Dagger2 wrote:I suppose I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but... having v6 doesn't break existing games. Games that don't support it will just ignore it.
VM in Ireland use DS-lite, which means that in addition to getting v6, your v4 gets CGNATed. It's the CGNAT that's the problem, not the v6 -- in fact the v6 is the solution to the problems the CGNAT causes.
Yes, agreed. My XBox uses IPv6 and I don't have to port forward or jump through hoops to get XBox live "opened" However, I was only pointing out the "solution" in Ireland. :)
- The lack of a proper dual stack provision is the problem. Well at least until v4 disappears completely from the innternet. I currently use HE tunnelbroker to provide my V6 and will be happy to continue till the day there is no ISP out there only using v4.
Until that day how can I connect back to my network and home devices when the connection in the hotel/bar etc is IPv4? I spend most of my days on sites that only have v4 and getting a VPN established back to home through a site firewall etc can be a devil of a job in the first place.
Timwilky wrote:
Until that day how can I connect back to my network and home devices when the connection in the hotel/bar etc is IPv4? I spend most of my days on sites that only have v4 and getting a VPN established back to home through a site firewall etc can be a devil of a job in the first place.I'd recommend Zerotier. Free for up to 100 devices or run your own server. Depends on what the firewall blocks though.
Sunday update --- Virgin IPv6 growth has stopped. End of IPv6 infrastructure rollout?
APNIC's stats gathering has been going through a rough patch in recent weeks, suffering a clear common-mode discontinuity and possibly some common-mode slowdowns as well. This has reduced my confidence in the figures, so I've been posting fewer updates and doing more validity analysis. Although APNIC data is only a proxy for the variables that we would like to monitor, there are good proxies and there are bad proxies, and the latter don't help us. Hopefully it'll settle down soon.I think that the data is at least good enough to be accurate about the end of the previous rapid growth in Virgin's IPv6 counts. The difference between the high and fairly linear rate of growth seen since October 2018 and the current comparatively constant plateau is very pronounced, and cannot be attributed to a common-mode fault.
The only fairly convincing explanation that we've ever had for linear patterns of growth has been hardware infrastructure rollout, since this is typically manpower-limited by the number of available engineers. Based on that hypothesis, I think it's reasonable to conclude that VM completed some kind of IPv6-related hardware deployment in the first week of February 2019. The last date of that linear growth was 2019-02-06, reaching an APNIC IPv6 count of 22,398 on that date. Since then, IPv6 counts have hovered around that figure without large gains nor losses, suggesting that the deployed IPv6 equipment is in operation and stable.
Concluding too much from this would be unwise, but it's certainly possible that an IPv6 service is about to launch.
Morgaine.
Sunday update --- Apparently Virgin IPv6 infrastructure rollout has been completed, but no sign of service.
We're still in the same situation as a fortnight ago. After the strong almost linear growth ended on 2019-02-06, we entered a fairly stable plateau period featuring only small gains and losses. What little IPv6 growth there was reached a peak of 22,480 counts on 2019-02-26.In March, small losses have begun to dominate, perhaps a sign of early-life equipment failure, which does happen to a small percentage of new gear. Considering that we observed over 4 months of daily growth in IPv6 activity, there might well be of the order of 120 items or sets of equipment (routers, gateways, switches, PDUs, etc) deployed during the period of growth, plenty of opportunity for a few pieces to check out of life early. Burn-in of high-end or life-critical electronics is often done by diligent manufacturers to catch the most severe cases of infant mortality in equipment, but it is very expensive and commonly avoided for mass-market gear.
It has been a month now since this hypothesized IPv6 equipment rollout was completed, and still not a peep from Virgin. This veil of total silence is pretty abusive to us, the customers, who are paying their wages and are the source of all their profits. Keeping your stakeholders in the loop is part of quality management, a principle which seems to elude them.
Morgaine.
Morgaine wrote:Sunday update --- Apparently Virgin IPv6 infrastructure rollout has been completed, but no sign of service.
We're still in the same situation as a fortnight ago. After the strong almost linear growth ended on 2019-02-06, we entered a fairly stable plateau period featuring only small gains and losses. What little IPv6 growth there was reached a peak of 22,480 counts on 2019-02-26.In March, small losses have begun to dominate, perhaps a sign of early-life equipment failure, which does happen to a small percentage of new gear. Considering that we observed over 4 months of daily growth in IPv6 activity, there might well be of the order of 120 items or sets of equipment (routers, gateways, switches, PDUs, etc) deployed during the period of growth, plenty of opportunity for a few pieces to check out of life early. Burn-in of high-end or life-critical electronics is often done by diligent manufacturers to catch the most severe cases of infant mortality in equipment, but it is very expensive and commonly avoided for mass-market gear.
It has been a month now since this hypothesized IPv6 equipment rollout was completed, and still not a peep from Virgin. This veil of total silence is pretty abusive to us, the customers, who are paying their wages and are the source of all their profits. Keeping your stakeholders in the loop is part of quality management, a principle which seems to elude them.
Morgaine.
Why would they announce anything, if they have no plans to start a service they aren't going to announce any work until its actually relevant, and you're confusing shareholder with stakeholder, they will communicate to the shareholders but not to us until they can sell it to use :P
Today is the ninth anniversary of this thread. Have any other threads been going as long?
Quite an apt time to add that I'm off to BT soon, now that FTTP is available in my street. I can't wait for the 10th anniversary to come round and still be in the same position. :smileyvery-happy:
