Multiple Sonos Boosts - Broadcast Storms / Network Loops

My view is to perhaps try the setup without the power-line adapter and see if that helps to resolve the matter, simply because those EoP devices can be intermittent and are shown as unsupported in the Sonos System Requirements. You may perhaps be better off with another Asus WiFi mesh hub in place of the EoP device instead.

Have you ever considered running Sonos on your Asus mesh WiFi instead of using ‘wired’ SonosNet mode?

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/sonos-system-requirements

You have a very nice looking network matrix.

Not my area but my understanding If the broadcast storms are a result of a rooter reboot it does suggest that the router is not handling stp very well.

You could try the tedious process of turning router off, power down the sonos, router on, turn the sonos back on one at a time and see what happens

If you do go down the road of trying the WiFi option it might be worth checking this page https://support.sonos.com/en-gb/article/asus-rt-and-ax-series-compatibility

Thank you - removing the power-line adapter or expanding the AiMesh to cover the area both need a new cable through a difficult route with very solid wall(s), but I think it’s probably the right long-term solution (and will fix the WiFi in that area too, which also drops-out from time to time). 

I will investigate options to get a new cable to a suitable location to connect up a new AiMesh router and then move the Sonos to use the AiMesh WiFi.

Is there an easier route to run a cable up into the loft and mount the additional mesh router in the loft above the living space or on the ceiling of an upstairs space if upstairs doesn’t have the thick load bearing walls?

Having wifi access points mounted above the living spaces can actually give better coverage. Signal penetration vertically through floors (unless they’re all concrete) is easier and the walls are just thin vertical strips the signal doesn’t need to get through for wider coverage.

Depending on the angles between the higher mounting position and the lower walls, it could still create weak areas where the wall is in the signal path.

Excuse the crude drawing, but hopefully it helps visualise things. The two green locations for example would be more likely to give better coverage across both floors (assuming upstairs is not solid thick walls) than trying to use two combinations of the red locations. Trying to get high locations centralised above the thick lower walls would reduce the amount of interference they cause.

Ideally Wifi access points in difficult to reach places would be much better if they support power over ethernet (PoE) then you don’t need to worry about finding a power point to plug them into. Unplugging the network cable at the house end of the cable to them would also cut the power if you wanted to switch them off while going away or needed to hard reboot them. Stand alone PoE+ injectors to use with ordinary switches or small switches than can provide 4 PoE+ ports are not expensive.

eg

https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/50348-tp-link-ls105gp/

https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/42960-ubiquiti-u-poe-at/

Ditching Sonosnet is the way forward as then although any wired Sonos units will still forward STP they won’t be actively using it to try and manage anything. Make sure you actively turn off WiFi in the Sonos app for any device that is wired in. After doing that reboot the whole Sonos system and power on the wired boxes first to make sure they are no longer using Sonosnet. 

Whilst the Sonos system is off, it might be worth using Wireshark to see what becomes the STP root bridge in its absence to see if something else is partly responsible for some of the issues. 

How refreshing to see a well documented question, with lots of information for others to help answer, and some good answers, reminds me of the old days.

BTW - Agree with all the above answers.

sigh wrote:

Is there an easier route to run a cable up into the loft and mount the additional mesh router in the loft above the living space or on the ceiling of an upstairs space if upstairs doesn’t have the thick load bearing walls?

Having wifi access points mounted above the living spaces can actually give better coverage. Signal penetration vertically through floors (unless they’re all concrete) is easier and the walls are just thin vertical strips the signal doesn’t need to get through for wider coverage.

Depending on the angles between the higher mounting position and the lower walls, it could still create weak areas where the wall is in the signal path.

Excuse the crude drawing, but hopefully it helps visualise things. The two green locations for example would be more likely to give better coverage across both floors (assuming upstairs is not solid thick walls) than trying to use two combinations of the red locations. Trying to get high locations centralised above the thick lower walls would reduce the amount of interference they cause.

Ideally Wifi access points in difficult to reach places would be much better if they support power over ethernet (PoE) then you don’t need to worry about finding a power point to plug them into. Unplugging the network cable at the house end of the cable to them would also cut the power if you wanted to switch them off while going away or needed to hard reboot them. Stand alone PoE+ injectors to use with ordinary switches or small switches than can provide 4 PoE+ ports are not expensive.

eg

https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/50348-tp-link-ls105gp/

https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/42960-ubiquiti-u-poe-at/

Thanks, I really wish there was an easy way to get cables up into the loft / ceiling space, but it would be a challenge, and I’m not sure would solve the connection to one of the Sonos pairs, as the left of the pair sits under a big steel beam, and the other sits under the house electricity distribution/fuse board.  I’ve ordered another Asus router and will put it in the area the other side of the thick wall (which used to be the external wall of the house), that involves drilling one (difficult) hole (away from the power cables) and should (hopefully) resolve all my wireless issues in that area with a single solution.   
The only thing I haven’t decided is whether to use native AiMesh on the routers (they then share common WiFi channels), or to set them up as one router and two APs (allows using different WiFi channels on each device, but loses some centralised management capabilities).  I will probably try both and see which works best for us.

Thanks for your input anyhow.

Thank you - I was worried my original post was too long ;)

I had similar issues with Sonosnet, Asus routers and STP in the past as well. There's an option under LAN / Switch Control to turn STP on, but this seems not to help:

The SSH commands you mentioned could be run on start-up as script, if you use Merlin. You can search for help on snbforums.com under Wireless Networking / ASUS Wireless / Asuswrt-Merlin.

In my case, I connect my Beam to Ethernet and disable wi-fi. Then, my surrounds and other speakers connect to my home Wi-Fi, using different nodes under AiMesh.

I have all my nodes wired to the main router and, instead of EOP, I use MoCA for that. If you have coax running in your house, MoCA could be an excellent option.

furacaopr wrote:

I had similar issues with Sonosnet, Asus routers and STP in the past as well. There's an option under LAN / Switch Control to turn STP on, but this seems not to help:

The SSH commands you mentioned could be run on start-up as script, if you use Merlin. You can search for help on snbforums.com under Wireless Networking / ASUS Wireless / Asuswrt-Merlin.

In my case, I connect my Beam to Ethernet and disable wi-fi. Then, my surrounds and other speakers connect to my home Wi-Fi, using different nodes under AiMesh.

I have all my nodes wired to the main router and, instead of EOP, I use MoCA for that. If you have coax running in your house, MoCA could be an excellent option.

The potential issue with ‘simple’ STP support as above is you don’t know what sort of STP it’s using and have little to no control over it. The problem with Sonos running STP is that it uses an older version of the protocol and most things these days use the newer version. The issue is the newer one completely changed the path costs and when Sonos devices report old costs, the newer STP bridges wrongly think Sonosnet is the fastest option and can route the wrong traffic over it…. On switches with more detailed control you can correct this for the Sonos devices, but on switches like the above you can’t. 

If you have decent WiFi, which is much more likely these days with modern routers, then not using Sonosnet is preferable as then you don’t need to worry about STP and Sonos. If you need to wire in Sonos speakers, make sure you turn off WiFi to stop it creating Sonosnet. 

I thought I’d provide you all with an update.

I’ve now put in a new (hard wired) Asus Router/AP to cover the area of poor reception in the house and (after some hassle) moved everything across to my WiFi.  Set-up now as below.

Sonos Support Info Network Matrix:

I had awful problems trying to migrate my Sonos players across from SonosNet to WiFi (it repeatedly came up with a fairly meaningless error right at the end of the process after a factory reset / at the end of the network migration process (for the Sonos Fives)), but after multiple attempts and several hours I got there.   

I also found the 2.4GHz WiFi on my main Asus RT-AX88U router was intermittantly faulty, so ended up having to replace that device as well. That may well have contributed to some of the problems/delays with the migration.

What I have noticed is:

(1) the Sonos devices seem very sticky to the WiFi they are connected to, and if (e.g. because of a router/AP reboot) they connect to a further away router, they tend to stick with it, even with a poor connection and a better one is available.  At one point after multiple changes and reboots to routers/APs my Sonos was awful, dropping out all over the place - I needed all the WiFi connected devices to be powered off and on; but now everything is set up and stable it seems ok.

(2) it looks like some of the Sonos devices are connecting to two APs.  Is this normal?

Anyway, all is looking good at the moment, Sonos Boosts all removed and no broadcast storms.  Any further tips on the “sticky” WiFi issue would be welcome.

Thank you.

A further update:  the Sonos being connected to two APs at once was an error on my part / inconsistencies in the ‘Network Map’ reporting interface of the Asus routers.  When I use the Asus System Log - Wireless Log I can clearly see they are each only connected to one AP and that is the one I would expect them to be connected to (no AP restarts/reboots have happened, so they are all connected as per when the Sonos devices were powered on).

The worst connected device (upstairs far corner of the house) is connected to the new 5GHz WiFi AP with a signal strength of -67dBm (AP measure) and a channel connection of 20MHz, 54Mbps / 24Mbps which seems to be sufficient.

All is working well at the moment; I’m just hoping it stays stable long term and will be interested to see how it recovers following a power outage (we live in a rural area and have quite a few power outages) - our main router, NAS, etc. are on UPS battery backup, but the satellite APs and Sonos devices aren’t. 

Thanks for all your advice and tips so far.

The WiFi client will decide what AP to connect to, this is not specific to Sonos devices. The AP can assist with ‘guiding’ the clients to a more optimal AP or band. You can reduce the power of the radio and/or set a minimum RSSI on an AP, so it will reject any connections with poor RSSI, assuming there is an alternative AP with better RSSI available. You will need to do a survey first.

I am not familiar with the Asus range, but I see it has ‘Ai’ in marketing material, so maybe it does this in the background, once it has the clients connected for a while? They may also have an option to se a preferred AP for a client, check documentation.

If you system is working now, I would put some music on and enjoy. Maybe read up on optimizing WiFi for Asus products, but have a good understanding first. Here is a link that covers a lot on one page:

https://www.wiisfi.com/

From you diagram, its not clear what 2.4GHz channels are in use, ideally you should be using on 1, 6 & 11. It maybe that your EE wireless channel 13? is causing non optimal channels to be selected on Asus, if they are automatic?

Maybe turn of wireless on the EE router?

Older Sonos devices will have older WiFi hardware, eg  you wont get better than 54Mbs on a Play:1

https://support.sonos.com/en-gb/article/supported-wifi-modes-and-security-standards-for-sonos-products

craigski wrote:

From you diagram, its not clear what 2.4GHz, ideally you should be using on 1, 6 & 11. It maybe that your EE wireless channel 13? is causing non optimal channels to be selected on Asus, if they are automatic?

Maybe turn of wireless on the EE router?

Thank you for the tip (and the link to the webpage which I will read this evening).

Turning off the EE router WiFi isn’t really an option for us, it is hardly used, but needed.  Following your advice, I’ve now moved everything 2.4GHz to channels 1, 6 and 11 (they’re configured to use these channels), with the EE router now on channel 6 (the same as the furthest AP away), it is hardly used (so not a busy WiFi), but hopefully at least on the same channel it should listen before Tx and interwork with the other AP better than if the channels overlap.  We are in a rural area, so neighbouring properties aren’t really a problem :)

I have two WiFi networks sharing the same subnet. The SONOS system is aware of both. I don’t have any older units, such as PLAY:3. The newer units are agile and can use the WiFi of their choice. If one WIFi goes down for maintenance, the units will simply flip to the other.

Looking at your network matrix, you have newer and older units. The newer units don’t report much here. The gray cells indicate that SonosNet wireless is not being used for this node. I notice that some nodes indicate a low signal level. Near 20, operation will be on the edge. This doesn’t much matter for wired units, but if the WfFi connected units follow similar signal trends, this could be part of your issue.

WiFi signal strength (sort of) and S/N levels are reported for each newer unit if you dig for it (for each unit individually). Unfortunately there is no tidy network matrix that presents the full system.

You can bind your speakers to a specific AiMesh node. Just click the bind button and select the Node:

 

Ah, something else. My speakers are all on 5Ghz. Even my Play:1. In may case, they worked better on 5Ghz than 2.4Ghz.

I have a large network and 9 Sonos Zones. When I want to play to all zones it requires me to have SonosNet to do so, as the WIFI setup only lets me send to 5 max. At least this was the limit when I last tested. You have a couple of options. 1. Start up script on your ASUS: You can write to NVRAM (non-volatile RAM). NVRAM is stores key/value pairs, such as your WiFi password, public SSH keys, SSID, etc. but we can use it to set a small command that runs when a USB device is mounted (e.g. on boot). There are several articles on how to do this. This way you have STP on boot. 2. Upgrade to a switching backbone such as ubiquity that has STP by default. This is my setup and have zero issues. 3. as stated above have the asus mesh beefed up with another device and go all WIFI. Another Note: remember also that SonosNet is based on speaker to speaker communication. The more speakers you have as hop points to those hard to reach areas the better the SonosNet will Opperate. “up to 32 speakers max including your boost devices etc. If your hop points are in relation to each other you may only need one boost “Single Wired device”  

I found the same here, much better performance on 5GHz than on 2.4GHz WiFi, even though we don’t have interference from neighbours.

After various testing/playing around, I found my Play:1s, Play:3s and Fives do optimise themselves from my 2.4GHz to my 5GHz WiFi when left alone for 24-48 hours (SSID of all my APs are the same).

What I have also done is apply blocking filters for each Sonos device to the more distant APs for that Sonos device to prevent the Sonos devices attaching to the sub-optimal APs.   That has given me much better performance and stability, even when I’ve rebooted APs/routers - the older devices don’t seem very good at picking the best WiFi AP when they first boot up, or after a router/AP reboot.  I do still allow them to connect to the 2.4GHz band as an initial connection (at the moment), but they switch themselves to 5GHz within 24-48 hours and this seems to work ok so far (been working well set up like this for a month or two now).