Enable IPv6

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.
The last thing I'll say on this, at least for the immediate future, is that I feel this line of thinking is extremely short-sighted.

Over the past day, numerous scenarios have popped into my head about how Sonos loses by not supporting IPv6. I could write a few pages about it all.  But I won't. My opinion on this matter is clear, and there's not much more that I can say.

I think it's a mistake to ignore this. It's the future, and you know it's coming. Take the time now to get it right, rather than be rushed down the road when someone - an ISP or a music service - makes a change that suddenly prevents your products from operating properly, affecting your customers' ability to use them.

Sonus is correct, in that nearly every home broadband ISP will find a way to provide customers with local IPv4 addresses that work via NAT (even while the infrastructure of many of them is already moving to IPv6 for transport.)  Similarly, people are today using IPv6 on the mobile phones and don't even know it - the mobile service provider uses IPv6 to phone, and there's dynamic mapping at both ends so IPv4 only applications work.  Google reports that nearly 20% of US users are accessing Google via IPv6 (and this up from 10% just a year ago)

Of course, the IPv4-only devices and applications are slower than those using IPv6, and are prone to overloading and jitter issues, as your audio/video stream is being dynamically mapped to/from IPv4 (along with everyone else) at some data center in the service providers network...  For example Facebook noted that devices supporting IPv6 are loading content from them 20 to 40% faster than those just using IPv4.

So, the real question is "can you build consumer home devices and services that only support IPv4, and still manage to get by as the Internet moves IPv6?"   Yes, you definitely can.    Are you at risk of having competitors show up with better performing solutions, and this situation becoming much more noticeable to your users over time?  Alas, that's also true – whether it's an issue depends on each companies competitive situation, user focus, and product planning timeline.

/John

John Curran 
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)

Does anyone know if the chipsets in the speakers even support dual-stack?

Sometimes (e.g. Wiznet chips) the IPv4 stack is baked into the chip.

However, I think we can focus on Sonos implementing IPv6 in future product releases and on their website and services as a first step. Existing hardware is a nice to have, but at least stop producing new stuff that won't work with the modern internet.

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.


I'll disable all IPv4 as soon as 90% of the services are IPv6.
NAT is horrible tech and needs to go extinct.

I've never seen a company that stated out so innovative end up so far behind.
Did your developers run away, and only the marketing team is left behind?

Just thought I'd point out the wonderful irony that this new community site is accessible via IPv6. :)

Just out of curiosity sake... if Sonos finally makes an IPv6 item, perhaps a Bridge, Boost, or a speaker that is hardwired to a router, that would then make the whole Sonos setup good to go for IPv6 services? That seems like the easiest way to fix the issue if this is true, but I definitely feel sonos should start making improvements before it's too late. To many competitors exist today to be selling 10 year old play 5s that still cost a fortune and haven't had a single improvement. I don't want them to re-invent the wheel but it's hard to justify buying expensive new electronics when I already feel they're on the verge of becoming antiques.
Every Sonos device on a network has its own IP address. If Sonos were to continue operating in this fashion, then every Sonos device would need to support IPv6.

I'm not worried about the fact that it's 5 or 10 year old hardware... IPv6 is something that would be added in software/firmware. And Sonos continues to support their old and out-of-production devices with software updates, even years after they stopped producing them.

IPv6 use continues to grow. This makes sense, since now four out of the five regional IP registries are completely out of IPv4 addresses. 2015 was a big year for IPv6 growth worldwide. The numbers below are based on Google data... APNIC numbers are higher in some areas as they use a different way of measuring user percentage. Cisco's 6Lab site shows both numbers on their maps, but only provides historical data for Google.

- IPv6 users in the US grew almost 10% this year, with 23-24% now using IPv6; over 60 million users.
- Canada's on the rise, moving up to almost 7% with a big jump in September; About 2.3 million users.
- Germany continues a steady climb, rising about 7% to over 20% now, almost 14.2 million users.
- Belgium also continues a steady climb, rising about 10% to over 38%, about 3.6 million users.
- Japan grew from about 6% at the start of the year to just shy of 9%... over 10 million users.
- Portugal almost had 300% growth... currently at 20% of users with IPv6, after starting with only 5.5%.
- Greece was just shy of 200% growth... starting the year at 6.75% now at just under 19%.
- Switzerland made a big jump in June, and continues to rise... over 26% of users have IPv6.
- Sweden IPv6 users just about doubled this year... over 2.5% have IPv6.
- The Netherlands started 2015 at about 2.1%... they briefly peaked over 4% before falling back to 3.8%.
- The UK took a big step this year, jumping from 0.25% in January to over 2.5%.
- Brazil also took a big step this year, jumping from 0.1% to almost 6.5%!

An ISP in the UK has begun providing IPv6-only service... the ISP provides ONLY IPv6 addresses to customers, then handles translation to IPv4 sites as necessary on their end. Guess what won't work on this ISP, since it doesn't support IPv6?

Music services will likely continue to support IPv4 for a long time, yes that's true... but if IPv6 only ISP's start popping up in greater numbers (and they can't get more IPv4 addresses, so this is increasingly likely), Sonos will be just as useless.

And to lend credence to an earlier comment about IPv6 being more responsive than IPv4... I submit the two Smokeping graphs attached. One shows the IPv4 response time over the past week from my VPS in New York to my home router in Virginia, the other shows the IPv6 response. The v4 graph clearly shows increased delays during "prime time", while the v6 graph is much cleaner.

Get going with this Sonos... many would say you're already well behind the curve on this. The devices can support IPv6, even if your servers don't,

Although I'm all in favor of IPv6 support, having IPv6 connectivity to internet doesn't restrict you from using IPv4 locally. I would assume that the Apple rules applies primarily for internet facing network traffic, and not necessarily for local traffic.

However, with that setup (having only IPv6 as internet connectivity), streaming services would probably struggle to function, since there are no IPv6 stack on the players. That will be a much bigger problem for Sonos. Having to rely on v4->v6 bridging in a local router or with your ISP is not a pleasant situation to be in.

Hi JeroenB, our team has already been looking into this to see if we'll need to make any adjustments to the app. The players themselves won't have an issue but we're investigating if any changes need to be made to the app and working to change anything that does.

Thanks for asking.

Halfway through the year... some updates on deployment around the world over the past 6 months...

- The US is up to just shy of 29% of users using IPv6. Of the top 500 sites in the US as per Alexa, 56 are now using IPv6 (up 10), with another 6 under construction/testing.
- Canada has moved up almost 2% to 8.8% of users using it.
- Germany has moved up almost 4% to 23.7% of users.
- Belgium is up to 43.4% of users...
- The Netherlands has moved up about 2.5% to 6.3% of users.
- Portugal has increased almost 2% to 21.7%.
- The UK has made a BIG jump of over 10%, with almost 13% of users using IPv6.
- Norway's at about 7% of users with IPv6.
- France has over 11% of users with IPv6.
- Ireland has 7.25%...
- Greece continues its roll with over 4% growth to 23.4%
- Japan's up over 2.5% to 11.6%...

Not sure how many Sonos customers there might be in Saudi Arabia, Oman, India, and Pakistan, but over 70% of the transit networks in those countries have IPv6 in place, meaning big jumps in user counts could be coming. A good many European countries have already passed this point (some at 80% or higher even!) so growth in IPv6 use is not slowing down at all. BTW, for comparison, the US has about 65% of its transit networks supporting IPv6. Of course, keep in mind how many providers and networks there are in the US versus the rest of the world.

The CIFS device would be the actual Sonos speaker/player, not the controller. Sonos speakers/players do not currently support IPv6. Sonos has made no indication of plans to support IPv6 at this time.