Vodafone UK to Complete IPv6 Rollout on Fixed Broadband by March 2025

Mobile telecoms giant and UK ISP Vodafone has revealed that their roll-out of IPv6 internet addressing for fixed broadband customers, which began at the tail end of 2023 with a “limited trial” (here), has now reached 76% of subscribers and they “aim to reach 100% by the end of this fiscal year” (i.e. 31st March 2025).

Internet Protocol (IP) addresses help to connect your software and devices with others around the online world – like an ID number for your connection. The deployment of IPv6 is thus taking place due to the exhaustion of existing IPv4 address space, which are now in short supply and buying additional v4 addresses has become an increasingly expensive task for internet providers. But we’ll save the extended history lesson for another day.

Sadly, the longer form IPv6 addresses are not directly compatible with older IPv4 addresses, and so the two will need to run side-by-side for many years to come. But this creates some added costs and complications for ISPs that implement it. Some providers have thus been dragging their feet on adoption for years, preferring instead to rely on their existing pool of IPv4s, which has only become harder with the passage of time.

The good news is that IPv6 adoption in the UK has risen, albeit slowly, from 0.19% in the spring of 2014 to 48.6% in the autumn of 2024. But some major fixed broadband ISPs continue to lag behind, including Virgin Media, TalkTalk and the majority of mobile operators. Vodafone used to be on the list too, but that started to change in mid-2023 with a limited customer trial, which was later expanded to new customers and then gradually to existing customers through 2024.

The operator’s Kester Paine (Vodafone’s Fixed Access Engineering Team) recently gave an interesting speech to the UK IPv6 Council (see the video at the bottom) about all this, which offered an update on their progress and revealed how 76% of their fixed broadband subscribers have now been enabled for IPv6 and they “aim to reach 100% by the end of this fiscal year“.

Some 38% of Vodafone’s consumer broadband traffic is currently using IPv6 and Kester said they’d “like to see this grow to around 60% to 70% in the next year,” although there are only “limited ways in which we can influence this.” In addition, Kester revealed that “total traffic, so IPv4 + IPv6, has grown significantly. But whilst we used to see a growth rate of around 35% per subscriber per year, this now seems to be down to around 15-20%.”

At the end of the video, Kester was also asked a few questions, including one that queried whether Vodafone were looking to give customers the option of having a static prefix. Kester responded to say that they perceived CGNAT (IP address sharing) as being “kind of inevitable” for IPv4 addresses, but that giving customers the option of having a static prefix was not on the cards “at the moment” and seemed like a “bit of a niche use case“. We should add that Vodafone customers have, generally, often been able to get a static IP by making a manual request to support.

Finally, the Council gave Kester a cheeky nudge to now get on with the job of doing IPv6 for mobile, which may be a matter for a different team. You can see the video of Kester’s speech below and the slides here. In addition, Sky Broadband’s Richard Patterson also provided an update on their semi-recent adoption of MAP-T, which we’ve covered before (here).