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IPv6 support on Virgin media

dgcarter
Dialled in

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

1,493 REPLIES 1,493

Sunday update --- Virgin IPv6 growth has stopped.  End of IPv6 infrastructure rollout?

apnic_2019_02_24_Sun_vm.png


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.

"If it only does IPv4, it is broken." -- George Michaelson, APNIC.

Sunday update --- Apparently Virgin IPv6 infrastructure rollout has been completed, but no sign of service.

apnic_2019_03_10_Sun_vm.png


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.

"If it only does IPv4, it is broken." -- George Michaelson, APNIC.


@Morgaine wrote:

Sunday update --- Apparently Virgin IPv6 infrastructure rollout has been completed, but no sign of service.

apnic_2019_03_10_Sun_vm.png


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 😛

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. Smiley Very Happy

how're we doing folks, any movement?

Anonymous
Not applicable

No change. The same 22,000(ish) users still trialing away and no news I can see from other sources.

Suspect we won't see anything until there is some clarity on Brexit. A lot of capital projects seem to be on hold in many businesses across the country.

cheers... and thanks brexit!


@Anonymous wrote:

No change. The same 22,000(ish) users still trialing away and no news I can see from other sources.

Suspect we won't see anything until there is some clarity on Brexit. A lot of capital projects seem to be on hold in many businesses across the country.


Dump IPv6 and IPv4.  Adopt IPvBritannia1

It would be a neat RFC Document....

Joking aside, Hard for me to see this as a normal "capital project".

----
I do not work for VM, but I would. It is just a Job.
Most things I say I make up and sometimes it's useful, don't be mean if it's wrong.
I would also make websites for them, because the job never seems to require the website to work.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Perhaps capital is the wrong terminology. IPV6 roll out is a long term project with no immediate prospect of driving short term revenue but soaking up money and people. A classic example of a project that gets put on the back burner when the commercial environment looks a bit iffy. Smiley Frustrated