Enable IPv6

IPv6 is faster than IPv4 (mostly because your carrier isn't intercepting your traffic and violating your privacy).

https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/examining-ipv6-performance

IPv6 is faster than IPv4 (mostly because your carrier isn't intercepting your traffic and violating your privacy).

https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/examining-ipv6-performance
Whether or not ISPs intercept, that piece hardly bears out the 'IPv6 is faster than IPv4' claim:

Conclusion

What can we conclude about relative performance of IPv6 to IPv4 from these measurements?

These measurements show that in a large set of 1:1 individual comparisons where the IPv4 and IPv6 paths between the same two dual stack endpoints are compared, the two protocols, as measured by the TCP SYN round trip time, are roughly equivalent. The measurements are within 10ms of each other 60% of the time.

While the connection performance is roughly equivalent once the connection is established, the probability of establishing the connection is not the same. The current connection failure rate for IPv4 connections was seen to be some 0.2% of all connection attempts, while the equivalent connection failure rate for unicast IPv6 is nine times higher, at 1.8% of all connection attempts.

There is still some scope for improvement here.

My own experience of running a dual stack for the last couple of years is that there is no obvious performance difference (approximately 25% of my Internet traffic is now IPv6). Part of that, of course, is that unlike most consumer routers my router is quite pokey and can handle IPv4 NAT without impacting performance much.

At some point in the future, as IPv4 becomes more scarce and hosting sites increasingly can only get IPv6 addresses, it's likely that IPv4 traffic will continues to be supported using proxy/nat devices (either in the ISP network or on the customer router). At this point, it's entirely possible that IPv4 will start to become significantly slower than IPv6.

It is very important to note that I'm talking specifically about Internet traffic here, not about private network traffic. It is fully possible to continue to use IPv4 within your home/office network for the foreseeable future even if your Internet service becomes IPv6 only. In this case your gateway router would continue to perform IPv4 to IPv6 NAT. Of course there some disadvantages to this: NAT breaks many protocols, increases latency and limits throughput. Especially on typical home routers (which are almost always underpowered) IPv4 to IPv6 NAT will start to become a limitation.

This will take time and mainstream networks and services are not at that stage yet. Realistically it's likely to be years away. However, I would personally prefer Sonos address this sooner rather than later as I reckon there's a lot of problems that need to be identified and ironed out, and I'm sure most of the IPv6 early adopters would be keen to help debug some of these scenarios.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is I don't think there are currently many (if any) Music Services which support IPv6 and, as this is likely to be the first major IPv6 issue Sonos has to solve, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation as there is nothing for Sonos to do tests against.

Cheers,

Keith

Google and Microsoft are both all about IPv6... I know Google Play Music supports it and would imagine that Groove Music would as well, though I don't have a way to confirm that. Also, I believe I had seen that Pandora is available through IPv6 now as well.

As a cloud services provider, Amazon is still working to support it (the exception is their elastic load balancer setup, which is currently their recommended way to IPv6-enable services hosted through Amazon)... but even while the core functionality of an app/service might not support it, many of the CDNs bringing the music to your system do support it on their networks.

Since I'm responding to a post about this topic, I'll also mention that US mobile carriers hit a milestone where over half (almost 55%) of their internet traffic is now over IPv6. I realize that cell carrier traffic has no direct bearing on Sonos, but it nonetheless indicates that IPv6 use is still increasing at a pretty good clip... especially since at the start of the year, that number was only about 37%.

I'm with Majik here... sooner rather than later would be the best way to handle this. IPv4 will likely be around in some form for a long time to come... but as IPv6 use keeps increasing, IPv4 will quickly become the laggard of the internet, and IPv4-only devices like Sonos will end up suffering because of it. Comcast is already looking into IPv6-only, with IPv4 mapped over IPv6 using Cisco's proposed Mapping of Address and Port (MAP) standard, which is working its way through the IETF. Comcast is already moving over 30% of its internet traffic over IPv6, and hopes for it to be 50% by the end of this year. As more services become available over IPv6, the numbers will begin to increase at a pretty staggering rate. I'd much prefer my Sonos devices to be on native IPv6 at that point rather than using a translation mechanism that brings down performance.

World IPv6 Launch day was over 4 years ago now... IPv6 deployment and use is continuing to grow at some rather impressive rates in many parts of the world. Let's see this happen sometime soon... please?

SOO... a post over in the Plex forum for Sonos just made an AWESOME case for IPv6 on Sonos...

Right now, in order for Plex and Sonos to work, it needs to use a port forward in the router, which allows Plex's cloud servers to make a connection back to the Plex server on your LAN. The problem is that with IPv4, those Plex servers are telling Sonos to play music from your router's WAN address, and some routers don't handle that kind of request - a WAN address request from a LAN device - gracefully, causing no connection to be made and no music to be played.

BUT... if Sonos supported IPv6 and were connected to an IPv6 network... instead of a port forward, just a firewall rule would be needed to allow the Plex cloud servers to talk to the Plex server, and Sonos and the local Plex server would be able to communicate directly since the Plex server's direct global IPv6 address would be given to Sonos instead of the WAN address of the router. Both devices are on the same network, communicating directly with each other without needing to go out to the router, then back into the LAN.

Now, I know Plex is an unusual circumstance since it's a media server running on a local network, and data about that server needs to be retrieved by Sonos from Plex's cloud servers in order for the connection to be made... but it's just another example of how IPv6 could be beneficial.

Oh... and while I'm here... I did some looking at the IPv6 numbers since my last update at the beginning of July... this is definitely the year of IPv6 growth so far. I won't update anything now... my next post for that will be in late December... but I'm really happy to see the levels of growth around the world that are being seen!

While it's on my mind... A tweet last night from Comcast's VP of internet service about Sky's IPv6 rollout in the UK caught my eye. Apparently Sky is 90% complete upgrading customers' gateways to support IPv6, allowing millions in the UK to now access sites and services with the new protocol from their home broadband connections.

Coincidentally, since my last check in July, the percentage of UK users using IPv6 has increased 50% over where it was just 2 months ago (yeah, I'm gonna make you do some work and go back to page 2 to see where it was then, so you can figure out where it is now)! 😃

IPv6 is only 20 years old, why would Sonos need to support it? My ISP (Comcast) reports that over 50% of its traffic is IPv6. Most people who have it don't even know it is there because "it just works". Meanwhile Chromecast Audio and Google Home supports IPv6 just fine and is quickly catching up to Sonos in terms of services offered.

Your local network will remain on IPv4, as the home is never going to have enough devices that you need to go to IPv6. Again, the players will continue to function perfectly fine.

Wrong wrong wrong. My new home network was built IP6 native. v4 devices are in an translation ghetto.
Welcome to 2016.

So yes, it's the end of the year... time for another look at how IPv6 use around the world continues to grow. As in the past, these numbers are based on the percentage of traffic to Google and its various services that is handled over IPv6.

- The US saw IPv6 use finish this year at just over 31%.
- Germany is finishing this year with over 27% of traffic using IPv6.
- Belgium IPv6 use grew almost 25% this year and is now over 48%.
- Japan is finishing 2016 with about 14.3%, almost 50% growth over the course of the year.
- Greece continues to significantly increase IPv6 use... up to 29.5% now, also growing about 50%.
- Switzerland is now over 30%.
- Sweden continues its slow climb with now over 3.2% of traffic using IPv6.
- Canadian IPv6 use more than doubled over the year, now up to about 16.3%.
- The Netherlands doubled their IPv6 use over the course of this year, going from 3.8% to over 8%!
- Brazil almost doubled their IPv6 use as well... going from 6.5% to 11.8%!
- But the BIG winner this year is the UK! They started 2016 at about 2.5%... but a major push by some ISPs there to get IPv6 going has resulted in an increase slightly over 680% this year, bringing them to just over 17%!

Other countries with growing IPv6 use include France (14.21%, up from 11% in June), Estonia (16.3%), Ireland (8%), Hungary (7.5%), Romania (7%), Czech Republic (10.8%), India (14%), Saudi Arabia (5.25%), Malaysia (12.3%), Ecuador (18.6%), Peru (15.8%).

A sure sign that IPv4's useful life is growing shorter is that the number of transactions involving transfer of addresses between companies has significantly increased, as companies look to offload the IPv4 addresses they no longer need and make some money from their sale to companies that are slow to adopt IPv6 and thus still need those IPv4 addresses to do business. There are actually companies dedicated to the IPv4 transfer market now, brokering deals between sellers and buyers!

It's time for Sonos to get into the 21st century of the internet and add IPv6 support!

ignore! 😃