Dagger2
Superfast
Joined 14 years ago
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Re: Hub 5x no DMZ and modem mode
As a nitpick, I'd like to point out that this isn't happening because you have IPv6, it's happening because you're on their newer platform which uses DS-Lite, and VM deliberately disable modem mode when you're on this platform because some routers don't support DS-Lite. The new platform has v6 and the old one doesn't, but that's not the reason you're having this problem. I'll also add that the new platform does provide v4 too; however, unlike the old platform, it's CGNATed, which renders a DMZ feature useless since inbound connections on v4 can't reach your router in the first place. There's no point in telling your router to do something with an inbound connection if your router won't ever receive any inbound connections. That'll be why the DMZ feature is disabled. When you asked them to "give you a v4 address", they interpreted that as a request to be moved over to their old platform, where router mode isn't disabled. I'm mentioning this because I'm super fed up of people blaming v6 for problems that aren't its fault. In fact, all of the problems here ultimately derive from the very problem that v6 is the fix for.1.2KViews2likes0CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
CGNAT is going to come whether you like it or not. At least with DS-lite you can still receive inbound connections. Google's v6 stats tend to be flat for the first 4 or so months of the year, for whatever reason. Perhaps we'll see something happening soon.4.8KViews1like0CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
I suppose I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but... having v6 doesn't break existing games. Games that don't support it will just ignore it. VM in Ireland use DS-lite, which means that in addition to getting v6, your v4 gets CGNATed. It's the CGNAT that's the problem, not the v6 -- in fact the v6 is the solution to the problems the CGNAT causes.3.1KViews0likes0CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
Deploying v6 is a one-time cost, whereas CGNAT is a never-ending ongoing cost. Deploying v6 will save them money. (It helps that something around 40-70% of the traffic on a dual-stack ISP goes over v6, which lowers the CGNAT cost if you have v6 available.) What does that mean for the monthly cost? Obviously that'll continue to go up by however much they think the market can bear. The only impact that costs have on pricing is to set a minimum viable lower bound, but that's only relevant if there's enough competition to force the prices down to that level.2.8KViews1like0CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
Other LG-owned ISPs that have done v6 do it by adding a new v6+DS-lite platform, and then putting new customers only on it. If VM go the same route, then we should expect to see about 2000 new v6 users per day (at 5 million customers and a 15% churn rate). We aren't seeing anything like that at the moment. Will they go the same route? I don't think we'll see them switch existing customers to CGNAT, and since they'll likely be tying CGNAT and v6 together (again based on every other LG-owned ISP in other countries doing exactly that) I think that probably means they'll be doing the new-customers-only thing too. So we won't see any big jumps as PoPs go online because the existing customers on those PoPs would need to cancel and sign up again first.3.2KViews0likes0CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
The slow ramp-up could be explained by a need to reboot the cable modem/router to get a v6 address. If VM forced reboots on the affected customers then you'd get the on/off steps in the graph, but if not then you'd see the slow increases/decreases. As for set-top boxes, I was under the impression that they only had an IP from the management network, which is RFC1918. That means they won't need public IPs... but it is worth remembering that RFC1918 is only about 18 million addresses, which starts to look rather small when you need to assign management addresses for all cable modems and all (legacy) STBs, plus network infrastructure and also all company-internal networks, especially when Project Lightning means they also need to plan for significant growth. RFC1918 isn't a magical fix to everything. (In principle you could run two separate instances of RFC1918, but the administrative overhead of that is very non-trivial and it's something you really want to avoid doing. Comcast in the US actually started using public v4 space for their management network to avoid doing that.)2.9KViews0likes0CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
They have a lot of announcements that look like this: 62.30.0.0/15 Virgin Media Limited 62.30.0.0/16 Virgin Media Limited 62.31.0.0/16 Virgin Media Limited which is 65k IPs, not 131k. If you remove all of the overlapping announcements then I make it about 8.3 million IPs. bgp.he.net says "IPs Originated (v4): 9,471,488" including all of the customer prefixes, so that looks about right. Comparing that 8.3 million figure vs your 14 million estimate... yeah. You didn't even account for infrastructure address use or allocation inefficiencies and you still ended up with an estimate that was 1.7x higher than the address space they have available. And you wonder why they want CGNAT?2.2KViews2likes0CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
Google's stats showed no substantial bump in 2015 either; they spent the second half of 2015 growing gradually from 2.5% to 3.5%. I think that bump in Akamai's stats is a measurement artefact. I've seen similar things happen when v4 fails but v6 continues to work, meaning that v6 is a larger percentage of the remaining traffic, although not normally for 6 whole months. but sticking to IPv4 won't cause the big players any actual issues You're not paying enough attention to the big players (which is understandable, since they tend to be pretty private about most of their operations); they've been hitting issues due to v4 exhaustion for years and years now. So far they've been able to manage by throwing time and money at the problem, and/or by degrading the service they offer to users, but who ultimately pays for that?Re: IPv6 support on Virgin media
It's fun how everybody likes to argue "most people are fine with NATed v4, so we don't need v6", but the moment you extend that to "most people are fine with CGNATed v4, so we don't need public v4 addresses" they get super uppity about it. We're out of v4, folks. CGNAT is gonna happen whether you like it or not, because there's simply no other way to continue to provide v4 service to people. That's what being "out" means. You might blame VM for doing it earlier than needed, but somebody has to go first. (In the UK that would be Hyperoptic, or any number of community and small scale ISPs -- VM aren't even close to being the first UK ISP to do CGNAT, although they'd be the biggest.) If anything, we should be glad that VM are giving us v6 at all, so we can continue to host stuff. There are a lot of ISPs out there that do CGNATed v4 and no v6 whatsoever, which means you straight up can't host anything on them. It's bad that VM are tying v6 deployment and CGNAT together unnecessarily, but unfortunately they've left v6 deployment so late that it starts to make sense to do that and just get all the network changes over and done with in a single project, rather than trying to get management approval for two separate network engineering projects.2.1KViews1like0Comments