Some Background on Virgin Media’s UK IPv6 and DOCSIS 3.1 Plans

The parent company of UK cable operator Virgin Media, Liberty Global, has recently offered a couple of interesting updates about their plans for a future upgrade to Gigabit capable DOCSIS 3.1 broadband technology and adoption of the IPv6 internet addressing standard.

Firstly, we’ll talk about IPv6. Last year ISPreview.co.uk revealed news of a secret IPv6 staff trial (here) and we’ve previously been told that the full rollout could begin during H1 2018, although history tells us to remain sceptical. Nevertheless Liberty Global announced yesterday that they’d purchased Benu Networks’ IPv6 Dual-Stack (DS-Lite) solution in order to “provide a seamless migration to IPv6 in the UK.”

The aim of this is to “transition to IPv6 without impacting existing subscribers’ use of IPv4 Internet or applications” and in keeping with that the two companies have also partnered with ARRIS International plc. for “strategic architectural design expertise, integration, and deployment of the Benu Networks’ DS-Lite solution by the ARRIS Global Services team.” ARRIS supply the Hub 3.0 (TG2492S/CE) router that Virgin Media use.

The Technical Description

The DS-Lite solution provides a standards-based Address Family Transition Router (AFTR) capability per the IETF RFC6333 standard deployed on Benu Networks’ latest, high-performance, x86 Multiservice Edge Gateway (xMEG) platform. In addition to standard AFTR functions, the solution supports a robust provider edge routing feature set (e.g. MP-BGP, 6PE, MPLS) for tighter integration while also helping to future proof Liberty Global’s network.

Utilizing a software upgrade, the VSE platform running the DS-Lite solution can easily transition to a virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) solution to deliver Managed Business Network or Managed Home Network services. This supports Liberty Global’s GIGAWorld initiative announced in November 2016, which aims to accelerate the digital revolution in Europe.

Benu Networks’ IPv6 DS-Lite solution offers an innovative architecture with robust capabilities. Based on proven technology that is readily available to Liberty Global, and which integrates with their broadband customer premises equipment (CPE) (e.g. cable modems, xDSL modems), the Benu Networks’ solution:

* Provides dual-stack to users without requiring any public IPv4 address to be assigned to the CPE, thus streamlining the deployment and management of IPv4.

* Employs IPv6 in the access network to ease the IPv4 exhaustion issue and simplify the management of the access network.

* Supports native IPv6 traffic in the ISP core network which further promotes the adoption of IPv6.

* Delivers a future proof network which does not require new hardware to enable new network functions/services such as a Virtual Services Gateway.

The announcement confirms that Virgin Media are pressing ahead with IPv6, although it also appears to come somewhat late in their deployment strategy and as such we don’t know what impact the implementation side will have on their current rollout timescale.

DOCSIS Network Upgrades

Elsewhere the CEO of Liberty Global, Mike Fries, has finally offered an update on their DOCSIS 3.1 broadband deployment strategy. At present Virgin Media’s existing Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) cable network uses EuroDOCSIS and this can in theory push broadband speeds up to near 1Gbps territory (currently 350Mbps for UK homes), while DOCSIS 3.1 is significantly faster (multi-Gigabit capable) and generally better.

At the end of 2016 Liberty Global set out a plan that would see DOCSIS 3.1 capable broadband being deployed to the 11 European countries in which it operates (most were expected to be done by the end of 2018 with field trials due before the end of 2017), although the operator’s progress has since become a source of much debate and it hasn’t even been mentioned in recent financial results.

At the end of last year we asked Virgin Media about all this and they informed us that they had no plans in the immediate term for a trial of the new technology, which was a noteworthy change of position (they previously expected to conduct some sort of customer trial by the end of 2017). In our view this indicated a greater focus on getting the most out of their existing network and supporting the Project Lightning network expansion.

Now Mike Fries has told investors that more than 90% of their networks across should be ready for DOCSIS 3.1 deployments in 2018. “We are darn near all the way there in terms of having our entire footprint gigabit ready with 3.1,” Fries said (Broadband World News).

Indeed Virgin Media have already put a lot of DOCSIS 3.1 capable kit inside their UK network too but a big question mark still remains over when they’ll flick the switch and on this point Mike was non-committal, effectively suggesting that they’ll do it when they see a need.

Mike Fries added:

“The only cost we’ll really incur down the road is for new 3.1 modems. Of course, we’ll do that when we’re ready and we’ll do that in the most economic way possible… We won’t just roll out 3.1 indiscriminately; we’ll roll it out to customers that pay us more for the higher speeds and the better services.”

A quick look at UPC in Switzerland, which has a similar setup to Virgin Media in the UK, shows that existing technology can deliver a top speed of 500Mbps and possibly even faster (assuming you can see a need for that sort of speed today, never mind the usual bottlenecks of WiFi and slow internet servers etc.).