Some general UK IPv6 news for today, 2nd May 2018:
BT has just reached another IPv6 milestone --- 4 million daily IPv6 counts as measured by APNIC. Congratulations, BT !!! 🙂
Here are the last few daily samples taken from APNIC's public stats:
DATE AS Users IPv6-Users %UKv6
========== == ========== ========== =====
2018_04_29: BT 11,411,215 3,978,234 23.32
2018_04_30: BT 11,422,473 3,996,894 23.32
2018_05_01: BT 11,401,525 3,999,437 23.23
2018_05_02: BT 11,407,197 4,006,326 23.25 <-- Ding!
The graph below shows BT's IPv6 growth (light blue curve) in the context of the other "Big Three" UK ISPs, with Sky far in the lead:
4 million is 34.7% of APNIC counts measured over BT's AS, so achieving it deserves a big pat on the back. When one third of your traffic sessions are carried over IPv6, it's clear that IPv6 has become a solid pillar of the current Internet, not just the Internet of the future.
The graph also highlights a less happy observation, namely that at BT's current rate of IPv6 growth, it will be many years before all BT Broadband customers have an IPv6-enabled CPE --- that's a major problem which needs to be addressed by them. Hopefully the company will roll out their HH6 CPE quickly to all customers in response to their HH5 upgrade issues, or find some other way of overcoming the problem.
If I have interpreted the APNIC data for Virgin Media correctly, BT are about to find themselves in third place behind both Sky and Virgin, and a distant third at that, because Virgin implemented a mandatory CPE upgrade plan recently so it's likely that most remaining legacy kit can support whatever is coming. If VM manages to provide a large majority of its subscribers with IPv6, BT is going to have to engage an emergency action plan or suffer years of embarrassment and a costly loss of customers.
Morgaine.
That mention of turning off the IPv6 of gamer trailists brought to my mind the other (probably 2 year old) Elephant in the room being the nasty Intel Puma6 issue. Basically, the core of the SubparHub3 has a flaw which means that under even moderate load it is not capable of responding to aspects of the data passing through it fast enough and the packet latency soars into the 100s of milliseconds. This is bad news for real-time gaming as it means that timing-important game data gets held up enough to make some games either unplayable or to cripple the VM customer player relative to other players on ISPs who do not have the Intel device at the core of their CPE {See this topic - but it is now at 374 pages https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Gaming-Support/Hub-3-Compal-CH7465-LG-TG2492LG-and-CGNV4-Latenc... }. There had not been any indications that VM are in a position to update their way out of it (although a recent post looked a bit promising) - so perhaps they are holding out on switching on IPv6 because running a Dual-Stack on the Hub will make things even worse and they are going to hold out until Intel compensates them {here's a form that VM might want to consider filling out: https://www.classactionlawyers.com/puma6/ !} or they can get their hands on kit that can do the work as a SuperHub4...
I mean, take a look at my Max Latency (yellow graph) right now: 
After all this secrecy and time in silence, the least that VM can do is make a small and very dramatic video of when they finally use one of these buttons to deploy IPv6 to production.
