Long time since I was on here….
Just reporting in that I caved in and bought the Asus AIMesh CT8 WiFi system last week. Our house is a largeish 3-4 storey Georgian house with a lot of thick stone walls and I was getting flaky WiFi coverage through the house, lots of dead spots, and Sonos was driving me mad - in particular constantly getting the “Unable to connect to Sonos” message on my Android phone.
So the end result is that the Asus AIMesh CT8 system (I have two boxes, one the router, wired to the Netgear DM200 modem) the other a “node” using 5GHz backhaul to the router works very well and plays very nicely with Sonos.
WiFi coverage throughout the house (~400 sq m) is amazingly good.
Sonos works perfecty although for some reason I had great trouble getting one Connect:Amp reconnected - had to factory reset several times and add - eventually it worked.
I have not yet seen the dreaded “unable to connect” message - turning on BBC Radio 4 first thing in the morning just works (previously, it was a nightmare).
One learning point - I was almost giving up on the installation - things just kept falling over - until I discovered that there was a residual powerline adapter still trying to do its own WiFi and this was screwing everything up. A bit of logical sleuthing uncovered the issue, I reset the powerline adaptor and bingo! Download 60MBPS, upload 18MBPS and WiFi throughout the house at 40MBPS.
I attach a matrix fyi and any comment.
Cheers
Dick