Contributor I

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Mixed wired/wireless with SonosNet disabled

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Humour me here, but is it possible to create a mixed wired/wireless network where the wireless devices are connected to regular wifi and SonosNet is disabled?

Here is my scenario...

I have a large 5x AP wifi network which provides great coverage throughout my house, but obviously I am using all 3 non-overlapping 2.4GHz wifi channels to provide this coverage.

I have about 20 Sonos devices, all connected to the wifi, working fine.

But I also have in excess of 100x IOT devices on the 2.4GHz wifi - low bandwidth, but can be quite chatty. I’d like to offload as much traffic off the 2.4GHz network as possible, so I’m thinking of wiring some of the Sonos devices. I have wired Ethernet in a bunch of places where I could easily wire to a Sonos device, but not all Sonos devices.

I want to avoid the wired devices setting up SonosNet, as I don’t want to be creating interference on any 2.4GHz channel. That would be counter-productive.

So my ideal would be that I wire up the Sonos devices that I can, and the rest stay connected to the regular wifi.

Is this possible? If so how do I do it?

Thanks for any help.

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rattyAnswer

Now that I understand SonosNet a bit better (with your help), can I paraphrase your point by saying “it’s better to have SonosNet on the same channel as Wifi where CSMA/CA will be used to share the bandwidth than on a partially overlapping channel such as 3”

Absolutely. Partial overlaps are seen as noise/interference on both sides. SNR falls and packet loss can readily set in.

Lastly, on the way to turn on mixed mode, i.e. ethernet connected, and wifi setting turned off, I suspected this might be the way to disable SonosNet, but wasn’t certain as it’s not well documented what this setting exactly does. (and it’s slightly misleadingly labelled as in my view SonosNet is not wifi)

Don’t get me started! A number of us have been commenting for years that “disable WiFi” is misleading terminology, resulting in users mistakenly thinking they need to do so after switching to SonosNet mode, and ….

The most likely devices that I would wire in are my sounbars (a mix of Arc, Beam & Playbar) - if I wire these devices and “disable wifi” - this shouldn’t affect the connection to the surround speakers / subs should it?

Yes it would. It disables all the wireless on the device. This is often where users who “disable WiFi” after wiring an HT master speaker come unstuck.

In your case if you did so the HT satellites would connect to the 2.4GHz WiFi instead. The roundabout route from the HT master would introduce latency spikes and the satellites would be likely to drop out.

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danpsAuthor

Contributor I

FWIW. In my own experience in the past, when using a multi-access-point WiFi setup at Home, I found it best to stick all wireless AP’s on one ‘fixed’, least-used, non-overlapping 2.4Ghz channel (usually channel 1 in my case) with a channel width of 20MHz like @ratty mentions. I set SonosNet to the other least-used channel (Channel 11) - obviously my neighbours like to use channel 6.

For regular wifi, I’d be surprised if this doesn’t create problems, or at a minimum some delay when a client roams from one AP to another. Probably works great for fixed devices, but do you find mobile devices roam OK? Or these days most mobile devices are probably connected to 5GHz anyway, which I assume you don’t use the same channel numbers on your APs?

Ken_Griffiths

FWIW. In my own experience in the past, when using a multi-access-point WiFi setup at Home, I found it best to stick all wireless AP’s on one ‘fixed’, least-used, non-overlapping 2.4Ghz channel (usually channel 1 in my case) with a channel width of 20MHz like @ratty mentions. I set SonosNet to the other least-used channel (Channel 11) - obviously my neighbours like to use channel 6.

For regular wifi, I’d be surprised if this doesn’t create problems, or at a minimum some delay when a client roams from one AP to another. Probably works great for fixed devices, but do you find mobile devices roam OK? Or these days most mobile devices are probably connected to 5GHz anyway, which I assume you don’t use the same channel numbers on your APs?

Yes, I had no issues using iPhone/iPad/Android tablet - they just need to be connected to each AP one time (just a case of re-entering password - first connection only) and after that I had no issues moving about the Home at all. I have iPhone XR and iPad Pro (3rd gen) as my main controllers and a generic Android 10 (64 bit) tablet.

Edit: I do have all connected to the 5Ghz band and the 5Ghz channel (set to ch 40) are set the same on every access point too and same 40MHz channel-width (although 80Mhz is fine too). So all things set identical to the main router ..and all ‘fixed’.

ratty

For regular wifi, I’d be surprised if this doesn’t create problems, or at a minimum some delay when a client roams from one AP to another. Probably works great for fixed devices, but do you find mobile devices roam OK? Or these days most mobile devices are probably connected to 5GHz anyway, which I assume you don’t use the same channel numbers on your APs?

Actually WiFi devices roam best when the APs are on the same channel -- and with the same SSID/encryption -- at least in my experience. Unless there’s a centrally managed hand-off between APs the device has to do all the work, so making it as easy as possible makes sense. I should note that my mobile devices use 5GHz AC, so the bandwidth of the shared 80MHz channel is not an issue.

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danpsAuthor

Contributor I

Actually WiFi devices roam best when the APs are on the same channel -- and with the same SSID/encryption -- at least in my experience. Unless there’s a centrally managed hand-off between APs the device has to do all the work, so making it as easy as possible makes sense. I should note that my mobile devices use 5GHz AC, so the bandwidth of the shared 80MHz channel is not an issue.

Yes, I had no issues using iPhone/iPad/Android tablet - they just need to be connected to each AP one time (just a case of re-entering password - first connection only) and after that I had no issues moving about the Home at all. I have iPhone XR and iPad Pro (3rd gen) as my main controllers and a generic Android 10 (64 bit) tablet.

Edit: I do have all connected to the 5Ghz band and the 5Ghz channel (set to ch 40) are set the same on every access point too and same 40MHz channel-width (although 80Mhz is fine too). So all things set identical to the main router ..and all ‘fixed’.

Fair enough. Whatever works I guess. I can certainly see some logic here, but still probably not the best setup in my case. With (literally) hundreds of devices connecting on 2.4Ghz the other reason for me to use multiple non-overlapping channels is that more bandwidth is shared amongst fewer clients - ie I have 40 - 50 clients on each channel rather than 120+ all on one channel. Not only is this a bandwidth benefit in my setup, but also (in theory) reduces contention, and therefore latency.

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