Enthusiast I

MOVE not visible on the app via a wifi extender

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I have been a Sonos user for years, happily running exclusively on SonosNet. I had always liked the idea of a Sonos player that could be used outside and so when the Move became available, I bought one about a year ago. Unfortunately, I did not realise that the Move is a wifi-only device. Given the challenging nature of getting a good wifi signal throughout our house, (due to the structure of the building), I would certainly have thought twice about the Move, had I known this at the time.

Anyway, from reading numerous other posts relating to this topic, I realise that I am not alone in now suffering numerous wifi problems, but the main issue is that my portable controllers (i.e. iPhone/iPad etc) cannot access the Move, even when it is sitting next to my router, unless that controller is also connected to the same router wifi signal, and not that from a wifi powerline extender (PLE) elsewhere in the house.

I have now spent hours on the phone getting nowhere with Sonos support and their default position is that, effectively, PLE’s anywhere in the network make it unsupported. Whilst I always understood that to be the case, e.g. if you wanted to hard-wire a Sonos payer to the network via a PLE, it was news to discover that even using a wifi PLE for controller access to the system was “forbidden”.

I have tried numerous things to sort this out including: running exclusively on the 2.4GHz band, fixed separate channels for the router and PLE’s (Ch1) and Sonos (Ch11), BT SmartHub6 Wireless Mode set to Mode 2, etc, but none of this has helped. It seems it should be a simple problem, since everything shares a common SSID/password, and so I cannot understand why the controller does not recognise the existence of the Move, which is surely just another IP address on the network.

I would be grateful, if anyone has any other thoughts on this issue that might get round the problem. The only suggestion from Sonos is to install a wifi mesh network; however, that will take 6 disks and cost several hundred pounds at least. Also, I am not convinced that a wifi only system would be ideal with 8 Sonos players in the network and I would definitely like to avoid ending up with a “mixed mode” set-up.

I look forward to any comments or suggestions, that you might have.

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ratty

Sorry, I was referring to the use of, for example, the WA850RE as an access point, wired to your existing PLE infrastructure. Sonos doesn’t support WiFi extender/repeaters, and the system would in fact object if it detects one when grouping rooms.

I’m unable to advise on meshed WiFi systems never having touched one.

If you did want to replace your PLEs with another make I think you’d find it quite hard to check that they’d forward multicast traffic transparently. It’s unlikely to be explicitly mentioned in the spec. I suspect it would be a case of just trying it.

On the PLE interaction with other nearby electrical devices, it’s a known fact that their claimed data rate is obtainable only under ideal conditions. In real life the condition and length of the electrical wiring is a major factor, as is the influence of mains-borne noise from the outside world and from local equipment. Sometimes missed is the effect of ‘wall-wart’ power supplies plugged in close to a PLE. They can markedly drag down the strength of the high frequency carrier on which the powerline data is encoded, reducing the SNR and lowering the data rate. In the worst case they can kill the connection, which sounds like what you experienced with the BT box. (Our BT box also uses powerline, but its power supply is plugged directly into the Devolo PLE which has a pass-thru mains socket.)

On the 5GHz, yes feel free to use it.

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