Enable IPv6

  • 31 December 2012
  • 71 replies
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in 2013 it is way time to add IPv6 support to every things we connect to the Internet.

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71 replies

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I'm currently trying to implement dual-stack here at work, and it's a painful insight that everything but Sonos would support IPv6 here. Even our printer has IPv6 support. Linux have had IPv6 support since 2.6.x kernel, which was released in 2003. UPnP will of course behave a little bit differently, and I'm not sure of the status for ipv6-support in that standard. I however do now that Intels UPnP framework supports ipv6 so there is some progress in that area.
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Happy to say that I agree with this sentiment. While most internet music services may not yet support IPv6 on their ends, home and office networks with varying internet services are already providing IPv6 service, and people are implementing IPv6 as it becomes available to them. Hopefully Sonos is at least testing IPv6 implementation for a future release... there's no doubt that adding IPv6 support will definitely be a challenge for them..
The devices don't have IPv6 addresses at the moment. Look at http://ZP_IP:1400/status/ifconfig and you will only see IPv4 addresses.
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IPv6 use on the internet continues to grow. Will Sonos ever grow with it? Here in the US, Verizon supports IPv6 for business customers and is testing consumer support (the last two or three revisions of FiOS routers they provide have IPv6 support, so they're ready once they turn it on). Comcast has enabled IPv6 for nearly all of their customers. Time Warner Cable and Cox Cable are currently rolling out IPv6 in select markets as well. Cisco reports that the percentage of US internet users using IPv6 has grown from .5% at the start of 2012 to almost 5% now (4.8% to be exact). France, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, and Romania all have 5% or higher numbers. Japan has over 3% using IPv6. Google recently reported that more than 2% of the traffic to its services is originating from IPv6 addresses. Given the worldwide reach of their services, 2% is not an insignificant figure. Akamai, one of the largest CDNs on the internet, has been regularly averaging (on a daily basis) over 200,000 IPv6 hits per second from North America since September, and over 200,000 hits per second worldwide since July. At 200,000 hits per second, that's almost 17.3 billion hits per day, and growing. (added links to companies' IPv6 statistics)
I will add to this mikev. I implemented dual-stack on my network recently. Without doing anything else, my IPv6 traffic already makes up nearly 25% of my Internet traffic. The figures you quote are important, but they mask the fact that the uptake is not constrained by the number of IPv6 compatible services on the Internet, it's constrained by the number of end users, which is directly impacted by the currently small numbers of ISPs that support IPv6. As networks start to roll out IPv6 to their customers, which they will be starting to do very soon as IPv4 is pretty much all used up, these figures could (and probably will) grow dramatically.
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I too am interested in getting ipv6 support enabled on my investment of Sonos equipment.   I am equally interested in what the roadmap is for 802.11ac support on the wireless interfaces.   Obviously the wireless side is a hardware issue and will likely required new investment to support which makes my continued investment in Sonos tempered by this alone.  I can avail myself as a beta tester if/when you develope a "trade-in" program to new ipv6 and 802.11ac capable products.  ;)

As for v6 I think this thread has been very insightful and hope that Sonos takes it to heart.  As someone who works for an ISP and is actively champion the dual-stack delivery of services to customers I find that making the "highway" available is only one part of this puzzle.  CE vendors need to lead the charge to make ready customer equipment to remain relevant and an industry leader.   Wait much longer and and you will find other more agile companies accelerating ahead into this new space.  Be advised the the new industry litmus test is to certify your products work effectively in an IPv6-only environment.  This test eeks out any hidden and long forgotten dependency on IPv4 stack.  This test allows us to know that we are not going to break CE equipment when the day comes that IPv4 is less desirable and turned down (years out).

ipv6-only reference: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2013/10/what-does-the-ipv6-only-web-look-like-video-of-lee-howards-ripe67-talk/

There is movement to test this idea on 6/6/2014 and document the results. I encourage everyone willing to give this a go register here https://www.facebook.com/groups/ipv6.only.day/

It would be a shame to see the existing product line not mature and continue to be the shining example of wireless hi-fi music in the home.

I remain a satisfied Sonos consumer for now with 3 amps, soundbar, subwoofer and play5 but would love to have some reassurance that my investment is not short sided.

Thanks
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Now that Google - one of the major players in IPv6 support on the content side of things - is available through Sonos, I'm going to bump this up again. Some updated numbers too...

IPv6 is now used by over 7% of users in the US. 
During prime time (with a 10 minute average), Akamai is now regularly handling over 350k IPv6 hits per second in North America, with occasional peaks over 400k hits per second.
Over 3% of all traffic worldwide to Google is now IPv6.

A note on the IPv4 side of things... ARIN (the IP address registry for North America) is down to its last /8 block of IPv4 addresses.

Some other numbers around the globe, since Sonos isn't only in the US...
Akamai in Europe is regularly reaching over 100k IPv6 hits per second (10 minute average)
8.3% of users in Germany are using IPv6... 17% in Belgium... 10% in Switzerland... 5% in France...

Sonos needs to at least start looking at implementing IPv6 in their devices. More and more content providers and CDNs are adding IPv6 support, and more and more users are being provided with access to IPv6. Yes, IPv4 may be around for years to come, but it's always good to evolve with the times and support new things before they become necessary.

As with Scott above, I would also like some reassurance that Sonos will be continuing to update their hardware with support for new network needs. I certainly won't be investing any more money into Sonos without knowledge of plans to add IPv6 support for the future. Aside from my "Smart TV" devices and Sonos, everything else on my network - router, computers, printer, tablets, smartphones, game console, etc. - all support IPv6. Anything new that goes onto my network will have IPv6 support, or I won't purchase it.
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IANA worked with the five Regional Internet Registries to develop a "Recovered Address Pool", and has now begun handing out those IPv4 addresses back to the regional registries. For all intents and purposes, at the top level of IPv4 address assignment, there are no more available addresses. And the regional registries are quickly depleting their available pools, and will soon be using - if not already using - their allocations from the recovered addresses.

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/05/goodbye-ipv4-iana-starts-allocating-final-addr...

IPv6 adoption is still moving forward, and its pace will only be increasing. Will Sonos be proactive and add this support before it becomes necessary, or will it wait until the last minute?
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Well, I see the "Not Planned" flag has been removed from this item recently... maybe it's open for consideration again? Here's to hoping Sonos chooses to be ahead of the curve rather than behind it!
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Comcast has announced that 100% of its network is dual-stack, with 30%+ of its users actively using IPv6. Also, they are now handling over 1Tbit/sec of native IPv6 traffic over their network.

Starting with the last weekend in June, worldwide IPv6 traffic made up over 4% of Google's peak traffic load, and over 3.5% of their regular traffic load.
Concur completely. Sonos, you are WAY behind the curve on v6 support. You want to be a leader? Do you part to drag humanity into the present with IPv6 support.
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Another bump, more updated stats... 2014 has been a banner year for growth in IPv6!

- Almost 12% of internet users in the US are using IPv6. We started 2014 at only 6%! Of course, Comcast's announcement that their whole network now supports IPv6 took a big step in that advancement!

- Some other worldwide numbers of IPv6 USERS from Cisco/Google...
  • Portugal - 5.24%... over 700% growth this year
  • Belgium - 29.5%... almost 500% growth this year
  • Norway - 8.4%... over 400% growth this year
  • Czech Republic - 8.3%... over 400% growth this year
  • Germany - 12.7%... almost doubled their user percentage
  • Switzerland - 10.3%... fluctuated between 10-11% most of the year
  • Japan - 5.9%... started 2014 at ~3.5%
- At least 4 other European countries are also above 5% of users using IPv6 (France, Estonia, Greece, and Romania), though these countries are growing their IPv6 user bases at a slower pace.

A new year is around the corner... and with it, a new frontier of the internet growing rapidly! My Sonos equipment waits patiently to join the rest of my home network in using this new version of the internet protocol!
I experimented with turning off v4 resolvers at home, and the Sonos app on my Mac would not connect to any services.  This should mean that Sonos is doing its own DNS resolution rather than handing it off to the OS.  This just seems silly to me, and should be something that is cleaned up.  Just adding to the pile of requests 🙂
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Time to trot this one out again... IPv6 growth continues, as does IPv4 depletion. Despite repeated reclamation efforts that have extended IPv4 availability, the US is slated to run out of IPv4 addresses this year. What that really means is that there won't be any new addresses available to be allocated to companies from ARIN. Of course some companies have a surplus of addresses that they can continue to use, and there will also likely be private trading of addresses for money. But nonetheless, IPv6 is still something that needs to be added to the Sonos system.

Just as HLS/chunked streaming should have been added a while ago (the format has been around for years) and has now hit a critical mass with the BBC moving nearly all of its streams to this format, IPv6 is yet another thing that NEEDS attention. IPv6 is all that is available for new internet growth in some countries, and without this support, there's always a chance that if a provider moves to IPv6, their streams will no longer be available for listening through Sonos.

The US is now up to 15.6% of internet users using IPv6.
Portugal has almost doubled their closing 2014 numbers already this year, now at 9.2%.
Germany is up a bit, now at 14%.
Greece closed out 2014 at 6.75%... they're up to 8.3%.
Estonia's IPv6 use has grown to 7.5%.
Malaysia is up to 7.25%, adding 1.25% to the 6% that they ended 2014 with.
Saudi Arabia has flipped the switch, and in the past month has jumped from 0% to 5% of their users now using IPv6.
Japan is up to 7.4%.

Europe and Asia are both showing significant growth. Many countries have already doubled what they ended 2014 with, just in the first 5 months of the year. Of course, percentage wise, to go from .3% to .7% may be pretty trivial. But this is still indicative that IPv6 use is continuing to grow at a rapid pace around the globe. Many European countries that read 0% back in January are now showing anywhere from 1 to 2.5%.

And as a number that should be a bit scary... in many countries that have significant IPv6 deployments, 40-50% of the most visited content is already accessible by IPv6. This is a figure calculated using the top 500 sites in a country (as ranked by Alexa) that have IPv6 available, and factoring in the page views of those sites compared to the page views of sites that don't have IPv6 available. I could easily list 25 countries that meet this statistic.

PLEASE ADD IPv6 SUPPORT TO SONOS!
Are there really that many Sonos devices on the public network? It seems like the only thing that needs to support IPv6 is your router (on the WAN side) since all of your LAN addresses are served by NAT and don't impact the public address pool anyway.
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Are there really that many Sonos devices on the public network? It seems like the only thing that needs to support IPv6 is your router (on the WAN side) 
IPv6 needs to be supported by your ISP (or use a tunnel provider), your router, and your devices. 

IPv6 doesn't use NAT like IPv4 does. Every device on your network with an IPv6 address is able to make a direct connection to the IPv6 server it's communicating with. Port forwards are a thing of the past; you now change a setting in your firewall to allow a port through to a specific host.

Devices can have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, since IPv4 will likely be around in some way for years still. But the future is definitely in IPv6, and there are already services (Google Play Music, for one) that support IPv6 access.

Also, just to note how far behind Sonos is... Everything on my home network - except for my Logitech Harmony Hub and my Sonos devices - is capable of IPv6. All of my computers, my tablet, my smartphone, my network printer, my Apple TV boxes, my NAS... all of it supports (and is using) IPv6. 
So I picked up one Sonos devices to see how I like it, and its OK but the fact that it does not seem to support IPV6 is preventing me from getting  any more of there speakers particularly if the Play 3 that I just got is not going to be compatible. 

Question: has Sonos responded to any of this stating their position on IPV6? and if or when the speakers will be made IPV6 compatible?
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So I picked up one Sonos devices to see how I like it, and its OK but the fact that it does not seem to support IPV6 is preventing me from getting  any more of there speakers particularly if the Play 3 that I just got is not going to be compatible. 

Question: has Sonos responded to any of this stating their position on IPV6? and if or when the speakers will be made IPV6 compatible?

The original status given to this topic over 2 years ago when it was created was "Not planned". About a year ago, they removed the "Not planned" flag from the idea, which means that there's a chance it could be added. But beyond that, there's been no further info on whether or not, or when, they might support IPv6.
So I picked up one Sonos devices to see how I like it, and its OK but the fact that it does not seem to support IPV6 is preventing me from getting  any more of there speakers particularly if the Play 3 that I just got is not going to be compatible. 

Question: has Sonos responded to any of this stating their position on IPV6? and if or when the speakers will be made IPV6 compatible?

Thanks MikeV, So... its looking like they do not want to sell any more internet speakers? they do know that internet speakers need to speak the language that the internet speaks?  interesting business model. I only have 1 speaker,  I would be super pissed off if I invested heavily  in this platform only to find that the company that's backing it, is not thinking about the future. 

I am also super concerned about the amount of time you have been talking with them about this and there is still no clearly communicated plans from them.

Not very reassuring.
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So I picked up one Sonos devices to see how I like it, and its OK but the fact that it does not seem to support IPV6 is preventing me from getting  any more of there speakers particularly if the Play 3 that I just got is not going to be compatible. 

Question: has Sonos responded to any of this stating their position on IPV6? and if or when the speakers will be made IPV6 compatible?

Which is why I'm not investing in additional Sonos equipment (I have 3 Sonos devices so far). Anything new added to my network will support IPv6 (now or in the future) or it won't be purchased.

My Sonos players, Harmony Hub, and IP phone are the only things on my network that do not have IPv6 support. 

All I want is some kind of acknowledgement that "Yes, IPv6 will be supported in the future" and what devices will support it. I don't want a date. I don't even want a guess. Just tell me that it will (eventually) happen. In theory it has to happen since, as you mention, it's the future of the internet.
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Well... this might come sooner than later... Apple is now requiring all apps for iOS 9 to support IPv6. Obviously IPv4 support is still required too, but it shows how fast things might be moving, and how quickly Sonos might get left behind by not supporting it...

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/06/apple-will-require-ipv6-support-for-all-ios-9-...
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Well... this might come sooner than later... Apple is now requiring all apps for iOS 9 to support IPv6. Obviously IPv4 support is still required too, but it shows how fast things might be moving, and how quickly Sonos might get left behind by not supporting it...

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/06/apple-will-require-ipv6-support-for-all-ios-9-...

Thought I'd also add this post from Akamai's blog... being a major CDN, they're in a unique position to see all the traffic from end-users that support IPv6. This post includes a nice graphic showing significant increases in end-user IPv6 requests over almost the past two years from a number of countries around the world.

https://blogs.akamai.com/2015/06/three-years-since-world-ipv6-launch-strong-ipv6-growth-continues.ht...
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ARIN's got about a month (based on historical numbers) before it runs out of IPv4 addresses. ARIN provides IP address space to companies and organizations based in North America, and is the largest regional IP registry as far as registered address space. More info, along with some history of IPv4 depletion, and some info on how NAT has been used in growing numbers to extend the life of IPv4... An Update on IPv6

APNIC (Asia-Pacific region) ran out of IPv4 addresses in April 2011... RIPE (Europe and Middle East) ran out in September 2012. In May 2014, LACNIC (Latin America and Carribbean) ran out of IPv4 addresses.

Obviously companies can barter addresses they aren't using (an article from Network World talks about the private IPv4 address market), which will help to extend the life of IPv4 a little longer... but with four out of five global IP registries out or nearly out of IPv4 addresses, Sonos should really be starting to work on this.
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There is a lot of news around IPv6 lately, and some interesting articles, thanks for sharing MikeV. When it comes down to Sonos and IPv6, keep in mind that we only connect to an incredibly small slice of the Internet. Sonos players only connect to our home servers, music services, and Internet Radio streams. That’s about all of the net which our devices will ever see. Those locations are all major and will, in all likelihood, remain IPv4 accessible long into the future.

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.

We are constantly monitoring the market and technology trends that are important. Should there come a time when Sonos players need to connect to an IPv6 server, we’ll make sure that you can continue to listen to music in your home. Whether this means making players IPv6 compatible, or finding a solution which will work somewhere in the middle.
You are completely missing the point and are part of the problem with this mindset.

> Your local network will remain on IPv4, as the home is never going to have enough devices that you need to go to IPv6. 

Seriously?  You think this is what IPv6 is about?  You think that the "home network" is the only thing running out of space?

Here is a very real scenario for your product.  

A few months down the road, this hip new company starts offering a service that is novel and your customers are clamoring for.  But because IPv4 address space is exhausted, they are struggling to get enough v4 addresses to support their business and the address space they have is getting increasingly more expensive to keep due to greater demand and zero new supply.  So, they deploy their service dual-stacked and simply say, "sorry, for the problems over IPv4, there is nothing we can really do about it.  It is putting us out of business.  Use IPv6 for the best experience."  

Now, your product is SOL because you think your own integration are going to be the big kids from now and forever more.  Next, you as a company scramble to implement support. but because you were too bullheaded to head our requests, you know nothing about implementation.  You have no expertise in building out a v6 network, so you struggle for a while getting the basics working, all the while that competitor of your which wasn't so short-sighed, is getting your business.

If you think this is far fetched, you deserve to be out of business.