IPv6 support on Virgin media

[dgcarter]

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

[Timwilky]

My bad.

I have the full /48 routed to the home network not as my brain fog gave me a "/64" to use in my comment. My network is very flat and no need for segmentation beyond ensuring the suspect  device such as Chinese CCTV  are all on their own vlans.   

The interesting discovery I had was google homes, They fail when the tunnel goes down due to VM changing my ip address, as they still get ipv6 connectivity to the gateway and I haven't reset the end node with HE. If only the HE system would use a domain name rather than ip address to allow the DDNS to propogate to the tunnel.

[ChrisJenkins]

It's easy to (a) update external DNS and (b) update the tunnel endpoint automatically when/if your public IPv4 address changes. All you need is an 'always on' system of some kind and a couple of scripts. I have had this in place for several years and it works like a charm. Avoids all that annoyance...

[Felim_Doyle]

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@Timwilky wrote:

I wish I could get FTTP, just for improved upload. The crazy thing for me is I live on a small 50s estate and the first 6 houses are served from a pole on the main road and have FTTP available from the Chorley exchange, the others are served from poles on the estate connected to Bamber Bridge with no FTTP available to us. we are scheduled to get FTTP by 2024 so stuck with VM for some time yet.

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It sounds like you need to find a small child who can shin up a pole and connect you to Chorley exchange! 😁

[adhawkins]

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@Timwilky wrote:

If only the HE system would use a domain name rather than ip address to allow the DDNS to propogate to the tunnel.

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 pfsense can do this for you automatically. There's a Dynamic DNS provider specifically called 'HE.net Tunnelbroker'. You need to specify the 'tunnel ID' (from the HE web interface) as the hostname, and then your  username and update key as the username and password.

Andy

[IllLustration]

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@jamesmacwhite wrote:

Well, it's finally happening! Openreach are deploying FTTP in my area ...

Gosh, does this mean that your de facto role of Chief IPv6 Evangelist for Virgin Media is coming to an end? I do hope not! 🙂

It's sad, though. Really VM's signal failure to acknowledge IPv6's significance to a user base that is, especially toward the higher tiers of service, essentially entirely self-selecting for technical aptitude, means that they are going to find themselves strikingly bereft of their best customers and advocates. Oh, well. I too look forward to FTTP, and I'm a newly-returning customer! Best of luck on your new travels, and please keep us informed.

[Felim_Doyle]

Keep tunnelling!

[jamesmacwhite]

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@IllLustration wrote:

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@jamesmacwhite wrote:

Well, it's finally happening! Openreach are deploying FTTP in my area ...

Gosh, does this mean that your de facto role of Chief IPv6 Evangelist for Virgin Media is coming to an end? I do hope not! 🙂

It's sad, though. Really VM's signal failure to acknowledge IPv6's significance to a user base that is, especially toward the higher tiers of service, essentially entirely self-selecting for technical aptitude, means that they are going to find themselves strikingly bereft of their best customers and advocates. Oh, well. I too look forward to FTTP, and I'm a newly-returning customer! Best of luck on your new travels, and please keep us informed.

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Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere, although certainly not the only one whos been vocal about it, I just make noise and bother VM employees and found others who think the same! I'm finally glad there's going to be some competition and the only fibre option isn't just HFC through Virgin Media in my area sooner rather than later, which means several providers with IPv6 without any tunnelling needed. I'll still keep the "Have Virgin Media enabled IPv6 yet" site, because it is a long running joke at this point and it costs nothing to run as it's all done through Cloudflare and GitHub pages. I've yet to receive any issue regarding using Virgin Media logo on it.

People say Openreach's full fibre rollout targets are slow. Pretty sure IPv6 being deployed by Virgin Media would like to "hold my beer" on that one. You'd hope with Virgin Media moving to FTTP, replacing HFC that some form of IPv6 would be around by 2028 but either way, I'd still document a timeline, so others can look back at the history and see the fun and games we had.

I haven't seen anything note worthy in 2022 for IPv6, so I haven't updated it in a while, but I do keep an eye on things.

At least with the Hub4/5 it has been proven you can at least run 6in4 without issues and luckily Hurricane Electric are happy to keep their tunnelbroker service running, so there's that. That was the double insult to injury. No native IPv6 and 6in4 hampered by inadequate CPE hardware.

[ChrisJenkins]

While I'd still really (really) like either Virgin Media to deploy native IPv6, or have a choice of another truly high speed option that supports it, at least now I have a Chita based Hitron hub my HE tunnel performs really well. I only see ~9% extra overhead, on average, for IPv6 speed tests versus IPv4 so it is virtually native speed over the tunnel and (touch wood) the HE tunnel 'just works' and is rock solid. With the tunnel terminating on my NetGate SG3100 running pfSense, and with a routed /48, it is almost as good as native IPv6 (except the MTU is a tad smaller).

Now just waiting for VM to deploy a 1 Gb/s option for their business customers. Sigh... 

[paul0363]

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@ChrisJenkins wrote:

Now just waiting for VM to deploy a 1 Gb/s option for their business customers. Sigh... 

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I thought they had...

[IllLustration]

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@jamesmacwhite wrote:

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At least with the Hub4/5 it has been proven you can at least run 6in4 without issues and luckily Hurricane Electric are happy to keep their tunnelbroker service running, so there's that. That was the double insult to injury. No native IPv6 and 6in4 hampered by inadequate CPE hardware.

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Well, to be completely fair I had some trouble with OpenReach as well through BT retail owing to their non-consensual full 1500-byte-over-PPPoE which was cleverly disguised by TCP MSS clamping in their network for IPv4, so if you didn't have equipment that did baby jumbos with PPPoE then IPv6 would just horribly break as well. The short-termism of our entire industry is frightening. But yes, at least newer options are arriving, and in the absence of regulation, that's the best hope for "ultrafast", native IPv6. Can't come soon enough. Now that I have a potential solution for extracting maximum bandwidth out of this cable modem over a tunnel I'll cling onto it; VM are in no hurry to ship new modems anyway. And HE are and remain awesome for providing this service to the Internet community.