IPv6 support on Virgin media

[dgcarter]

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

[Shelke]

Historically speaking in the beginning IPv4 allocations were being given out far too casually, it was like "Hello small company A, you have 500 employees and 20 computers so we're giving you 10,000,000 IPV4 addresses!"

No foresight what so ever about shortage and many companies who never did and still don't are still sat on tens of millions of never ever used IPv4 addresses tot his very day.

Kind of looks like to me that they are repeating the same thing with IPV6, under-estimating how many devices people will have at home. Come 10 years from now, homes will have every single device online with their own built in web server each, including the kids alarm clocks etc. And about the year 2050 we may face the same situation, but the demand would be for the move to IPV7 to complete because people got too large IPV6 assignments in the 2020s.

Anyway, not entirely about IPV6, but just felt like posting about how IP allocation in the beginnings seems to lack foresight and often grossly underestimates how need will boom beyond what they could barely grasp.

[VMCopperUser]

Strange enough that...

MIT sold off a large (unused) block so they could fully pay for their IPv6 conversion.

But we should never use all of our IPv6.  Not before humanity dies that is.

[Shelke]

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@VMCopperUser wrote:

Strange enough that...

MIT sold off a large (unused) block so they could fully pay for their IPv6 conversion.

But we should never use all of our IPv6.  Not before humanity dies that is.

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Well that's good. If all the companies who got larger than what they needed IPV4 wise just sold it off now in a flash sale. It would push back the need for IPV6 quite a bit further. The problem we're experiencing now is because of an artificial shortage made possible by giving them too freely away in the beginning. They had the mindset they do now, that there was no possible way to run out. But they were proven wrong and will be proven wrong again with IPV6. Humans never learn from their mistakes.

With humans, they consume, whether it be media, trends, whatever. There's nothing too big for humanity to run short off. And more Internet tech will continue to slip into homes leading to the standard home in the near future to having thousands of internet connected devices simultaneously. Homes already commonly have hundreds of Internet connected devices. And that's not even talking smart homes where every facet of them will be online and internet connected+controlled vehicles etc

Edit: line adjusted.

[Anonymous]

There are some crazy penny pinching ISP out there trying to deploy one /64 per subscriber (I'm sure there are some who would wish to give /128s if only they could). Most seem to have settled on /56s which is enough for 256 networks. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to start eating into this. I saw a video a few months ago where someone from RIPE (the European IP address administrators) was recommending giving people /48s or worst case /56s but on /48 boundaries to save the inevitable but painful re-addressing years hence.

[matthewsteeples]

@davefiddes - what's your use case for the general population needing more than a /64? Unless you've got a router that can manage VLANs there's no benefit, and 99.99% of the population are going to be more than covered with the single network and the (approximately) 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses contained within it. Once you start having multiple networks, you start needing admin/configuration and maintenance. If you're in the 0.01% of the population where you want to set up multiple networks, then there are still ISPs out there that will support that.

[Dagger2]

Before IANA ran out of v4 to allocate, back in 2011, we were going through over one /8 per month. That was back in 2011; demand has only gone up since then. If we could somehow get companies to give back their /8s, it would buy us... probably around 2 weeks per /8? That's very much not worth the effort.

Kind of looks like to me that they are repeating the same thing with IPV6

Nope, we're not. The standard allocation for an ISP is a /32, which consumes the same fraction of the v6 space that a single IP does of the v4 space. End users should be getting /48, which is the same fraction of the space that a single TCP port of a single v4 address is of the v4 space. We have enough space to give every person on the planet 5000 /48s (and each /48 is enough to number a substantial network with effectively unlimited hosts per subnet).

None of this is in any way similar to v4. If you think we're going to run out of v6 by 2050, then you haven't got your head around how large the v6 space is.

what's your use case for the general population needing more than a /64?

The use case is "to make multiple subnets possible, for whatever reason people come up with for using them". There is no good reason to prevent people from using more than one subnet, and plenty of reasons why people might want to do that (even though they might not understand what they're doing). For example, VM already ship routers with support for multiple guest WiFi networks, so that's a couple of extra /64s right there. How about routed virtual machine networks? VPNs? Cascaded routers (you might argue this is often a mistake, and often it is, but sometimes it isn't and in any case it should still work)? These are just the uses I can come up with now, and ISPs need to be giving blocks big enough for future uses too, not just current uses.

DHCPv6-PD allows multiple subnets to be set up and routed around with no user understanding, in much the same way that individual IPs are today with DHCP, so this is something that regular people can use via features in their software and router firmware without needing to know what's going on under the hood. It's the ISP's job to make sure that all this stuff is possible, and that means making more than a single /64 available to their customers.

[Anonymous]

Yep.

Use cases are not hard to think of. Each radio channel on an access point would perform better if given its own routed subnet. VM offered services like telephony or managed TV boxes need their own separate, secured subnet. How many homes have a single WiFi AP these days? IPv6 and wireless mesh networks will suck up address space. The concept of partitioning IoT botnets (sorry: devices) from regular users is becoming a more normal

The days of the single flat L2 network per subscriber are numbered.

Will all of this complexity be manually configured? Heck no! There are many moves afoot across the industry to automatically configure home networks. Have a look at the IETF homenet working group (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/) for some idea of how this might work.

The other key point is that even if the use cases aren't 100% apparent right now because of the largely static nature of IPv6 addressing it's important that consideration is given when designing roll outs. An ill-considered addressing scheme could paint an ISP out of important revenue opportunities in years to come (as well as upsetting their user base).

[Morgaine]

Sunday update --- we're still bumping along near the bottom, although the tiny trickle of growth continues:

 

We did pass that figure of 1,203 which marked the end point of the sudden collapse of IPv6 counts on 2018-04-10, although the eyeball-averaged "growth" is highly erratic when looking at daily data.  So far it has peaked at 1,280 (a week ago) and today lies back down at 1,263.  One can't really expect a nice clean curve in such a tiny IPv6 population.

"Be careful what you wish for", ravenstar68 advised a fortnight ago.  Well I just wish this agony to end.  We'll survive one way or another, whatever kind of IPv6 Virgin gives us.

Morgaine.

[VMCopperUser]

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@Morgaine wrote:n curve in such a tiny IPv6 population.

"Be careful what you wish for", ravenstar68 advised a fortnight ago.  Well I just wish this agony to end.  We'll survive one way or another, whatever kind of IPv6 Virgin gives us.

Morgaine.

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If I am unable to use VoIP (Partially due to many VoIP providers not being IPv6) then I will not be in agony.. I will be surviving.. with another ISP.

What came first, the Chicken or the Egg... VMNugget seems to be the answer ;P..

[ravenstar68]

@Morgaine

Well I just wish this agony to end.  We'll survive one way or another, whatever kind of IPv6 Virgin gives us.

You think so?  Read up - for IPv4 Dual stack lite ends up functioning as CGNAT that is you get multiple users sharing 1 public IPv4 address.

We already have problems with NATing one user with a single public IPv4 address, that is why they had to come up with port forwarding on routers (UPnP just automates the port forwarding process)

So were Virgin were to deploy a dual stack network - the following would no longer work.

• Home Web servers including those on NAS's and IP cameras, where a user might have set it up for access from their public IP.
• Many games would no longer be play multiplayer, and even those that do appear to work, might have some limited functionality.  This is because most multiplayer games MUST accept unsolicited connections from peers in order for them to work.  While port forwarding fixes this - you'll no longer be able to forward ports past the CGNAT address.
• Also consider what happens if someone on your segment gets IP banned - lets say from Virgin Media webmail - that means EVERYONE using that same public IP address gets IP banned as well.

All most users will see is that IPv6 breaks everything - even though it's not actually IPv6 itself to blame.

Result - Virgin will end up with users begging to go back to IPv4 or leaving.

The only people who won't be affected are those who simply browse and stream from the web.

Tim