IPv6 support on Virgin media

I'm in ireland and just signed up for virgin. Unfortunately I had no choice.

Nominally we have ipv6 but it appears broken. I have a virgin media hub 6 which I cannot find any way to switch to modem mode.

The hub sends out a /57 route. Fantastic, I thought. Not the /48 I got with Andrews and Arnold in the uk but plenty sufficient for my needs.

If you turn off the ipv6 firewall then incoming connections to ips the router knows about appear to work. I'm currently experimenting with a host with two addresses to see if the router forgets one. Incoming packets to the /64 get a no host response but there's no neighbour discovery.

I haven't worked out how to tell the hub the nexthop for the /57. Incoming packets to anything other than the lowest /64 appear to be dropped at the hub. I've tried providing a /57 and /58 route via RA but no luck. I know these are reaching the hub because I send them via ethernet and they appear on the wifi.

Local hosts using privacy addressing (apple in particular) seem to periodically lose internet connectivity and have to be disconnected and reconnected.

I foresee me tunnelling all my traffic to get things working!

AFAIK, Virgin have not officially deployed IPv6 anywhere, including Ireland (I might be wrong about Ireland). Here in the UK in some areas you can see some RAs etc. if you go looking but it doesn't really work. The good news is that if you have one of the more recent hubs than a suitable tunnel (such as Hurricane Electric TunnelBroker) works just fine and achieves near native speeds. I have the tunnel configured on my router so as far as my home network goes it behaves just like native IPv6. I also get a /64 and a /48 as well and they work as expected.

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ksim wrote:
How do you solve issues with geolocation and tunnel? most ipv6 enabled websites sent me to the lake in the US 😞
I mean a lot of websites redirect me to the US version instead of the UK

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For those services that I care about I contact their support and explain the problem. Usually then they direct me to their IP geolocation provider and I submit a correction. There are not a huge number of those services so in most cases now all of my IPv6 global prefixes geo-locate to the UK (London).

If Virgin Ireland don't support IPv6 officially then they shouldn't provide a routable prefix! Most things will default to ipv6 if it's available.

Mostly, in a very naive way, ipv6 appears to work. But I do egress filtering as well as ingress filtering, I run a proxy server etc, and it looks like the only way I'm going to get IPv6 to work for me is to use NAT66 which is "really not nice!"

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tjw-ie wrote:

If Virgin Ireland don't support IPv6 officially then they shouldn't provide a routable prefix! Most things will default to ipv6 if it's available.

Mostly, in a very naive way, ipv6 appears to work. But I do egress filtering as well as ingress filtering, I run a proxy server etc, and it looks like the only way I'm going to get IPv6 to work for me is to use NAT66 which is "really not nice!"

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If it seems to partially work, and Virgin say that IPv6 is supported on your connection (have they said that?), then you could try and take this up with their support (but, well, good luck with that...). If they haven't explicitly stated that it is available / working then, like in some places in the UK, the presence of RAs etc. sadly means nothing. If I were you I would start by clarifying if it is available / supported (assuming you can find anyone at VM who even knows want IPv6 is...).

Most telecommunication issues are discussed on boards.ie in the Republic of Ireland.

There are a number of threads on IPv6, DS-Lite, NAS etc.

Search 'site:boards.ie Virgin Media IPv6' for potentially relevant discussions.

I have an interest in this as I am a Virgin Media customer in both the UK and RoI.

Not any more. They're applying throttling to IPv6 tunnels (eg. to Hurricane Electric) since the big routing disaster a few months ago.

I can start the tunnel, then start an IPv6 test download, and I can see an initial burst of full speed, then it gradually gets throttled back to about 2Mbps.

I'm on a Hub 5 with Gig1 service.

I've been seeing IPv6 route advertisements for about a month, but no DHCPv6, which really mucks things up if your router decides to believe the RAs (you get a default route but no global v6 address to use it with).

Hmm, I just did a modicum of speed testing and I'm not seeing any throttling on my HE tunnel. VM Business connection with Hitron Chita modem (in modem mode) and 1 Gbps service.

I aint seeing any throttling. How long did it take for you to see the throttling?

Hub 4 in modem mode with gig1, pfsense router. Getting line speeds over the 6in4 tunnel

The throttling kicked in after about 15 seconds. I'm in North Manchester.

Interestingly, I've been seeing IPv6 router advertisements of 2a02:8800:f000:1630::/64 and 2a02:88fd:16:4::/64 for over a month now but nothing is offering DHCPv6 or SLAAC, and the router that's advertising those routes is rejecting packets if I pick my own v6 address in one of those ranges.