How to set up Sonos on a Tenda Mesh system (with or without a Boost)

In terms of noise and interference your Network Matrix is remarkably clean. As a test, move a speaker closer to the Dining Room. Or, if you have a long network cable, wire another speaker and move the wireless BOOST. This will simulate adding another BOOST. I can imagine that as “water bags” (humans) move around that the signal level could drop. I’ve never seen a wireless unit report a level much below 20 because the unit will disappear at that point.

We cannot rule out some sort of goofy, intermittent  hardware issue.

In some respects you are fortunate that your units are older because the newer units do not report much, if any, data in the Network Matrix. You can look at  /proc/auth_rincon/status and /sbin/ifconfig for each player in the Network Matrix. The data is a mess, but PHY errors, dropped, etc, are a hint about which players are struggling the most. (unfortunately, this not documented)

SONOS support has better access to network data if you submit a Diagnostic. 

Edit: In some respects this is an echo of ratty’s suggestion. He types faster and I’m distracted by other “fires” while typing.

I should probably tell you about our house: it is around 200 years old and stone built, with some of the external walls 18” thick. The internet connection and router are in the Study, which is fairly close to one end of the house (and of course the Boost is also in the Study as it is connected to the Tenda primary node. Here is a plan of the ground floor, where all the Sonos equipment is located:
 

The green spots are Sonos speakers, the red circle is the Boost unit connected to the primary node and the internet and router are in the corner of the Study. Entrance/Conservatory contains the Hallway speaker and is glazed. All other walls are stone or brick, with the external ones particularly thick (18” or so). Do you think I am asking too much of the system, given the type of house we have?

Taking on board your earlier comments about the Dining Room Left speaker I have hard wired it with ethernet to the Dining Room Tenda node. This seems to have improved things:
 

but the Boost still seems to be contributing little.

If the Boost is in the same room as the Study speaker then the Boost appears to be superfluous. Study could be wired instead.

However, wiring in both the study and the dining room puts the Tenda wireless backhaul back into the picture. Try disconnecting the Boost from power entirely. Leave the study speaker wireless; it will connect to Dining Room (L) with a low-but-possibly-viable signal strength.

(Wiring to only one Tenda node should work, since the WiFi mesh simply provides the internet connection.)

I’m familiar with “dense”. For a while I was living in a house started in 1788.

Is that Dining Room Tenda unit wired to the primary node? In your current test setup, try moving BOOST to the Inner Hall.

Depending on house construction a contrarian approach could place a couple BOOST’s on the floor above or below.

This is what it looks like with the Boost. As you surmised the Study has connected to the Dining Room Left:

 

See how that performs. Everything is now a single wireless hop out from the wired node. For grouped play, start with Dining Room and add the others.

Thanks for that Buzz - I’m trying Ratty’s suggestion at the moment to see if that helps. I’ve had 1 dropout in the last 12 hours so much better. Depending on results I’ll give give your suggestion a try. The Dining Room Left is not attached to the Primary Node.

I’m so grateful to you both.

Supplementing the current arrangement with wireless Boosts almost certainly wouldn’t change things. They’re likely to be bypassed, since the direct (single hop) wireless connections from Dining Room (L) would be deemed adequate. SonosNet looks for the lowest ‘cost’ path.

I have been running with Ratty’s suggested configuration, both with and then without the Boost connected. Sadly there’s not much difference between and I am still getting dropouts - sometimes because of poor network speed and sometimes because of not being able to reach the library:

 

Everything still looking OK on the matrix, so I am puzzled what the issue might be.

The issue, as at the outset, is likely to be the fact that you’re again wiring to two Tenda nodes which have a wireless backhaul in between them. Sonos thinks that wireless trunk is an Ethernet cable, when it isn’t.

As a suggestion, try my earlier proposal:

As an experiment you could temporarily substitute the Kitchen player for the Boost as the wired component, then position the Boost, wireless, somewhere in the middle of the house. See what happens to the matrix. If that looks like a promising approach, buy a second Boost and play around. You could always return it to Sonos within the standard period.