If ‘Shed’ is sometimes flipping to the closest Asus node then the Sonos must know your WiFi credentials. I suggest you delete them from the system, for which all Sonos devices have to be on SonosNet (WM:0 in About My System). Allowing a few players to switch from SonosNet to WiFi (‘mixed mode’) can result in instability. Rooms can indeed go missing and grouping can hit glitches.

If a phone on a satellite Asus node is consistently able to see the wired ‘Hallway’ player at all times, it sounds as though discovery multicasts are getting across the Asus backbones okay. For the wireless Sonos nodes alone to go missing it does rather seem like wireless interference of some kind could be in play.

Does the Asus wireless backbone use 40MHz width at 2.4GHz? That could hit SonosNet on ch6 quite badly. Are the Asus nodes anywhere near the Sonos devices?

Thanks Ratty. I’ve removed the wifi access to the Sonos installation. No difference. 

The nodes and 3 speakers are within a metre of each other. (hallway, kitchen, shed) The original advise I was given was to connect one to each node. That didn’t work very well at all. 

I’m using the 5ghz for the backbone. I’ve also reset the 2.4 to 20Mhz width. 

I’ve tried the following. 

disconnect hallway from router. Connected (wire) Kitchen to closest node. Reboot all speakers. Now I can see and group just fine, if my phone or ipad is connected to that node. Can no longer connect at all to Sonos if connected to another node. Oops. 

Plugged hallway back in. Now the app connects to Sonos but shows one random room and sometimes the hallway. Same in shed if I connect that speaker to the node there, I can see shed but nothing else. 

I had tried just running all the speakers through the mesh wifi (no sonosnet) but it was as stable as a 3 legged donkey. Rooms appear and disappear randomly. Refused to connect to the samba drive on the primary router at times. 

I’ve never used Asus kit in AI mesh mode, but assume it switches the satellite nodes into ‘bridge/AP mode’? They would need to disable the local routing function and DHCP server.

The way you describe it, rather than wireless packet loss -- and I understand you’ve tried various channel permutations there -- something could be messing with the UPnP discovery/responses. You say that you have “UPnP active” on the router(s). Turn it off and see if that makes a difference. It’s Gateway Control UPnP anyway (which BTW is a security vulnerability), so should be immaterial to Sonos’ use of UPnP, but some routers can get confused. 

Lost my reply. D’oh. 

Anyway, no improvement so I went with the nuclear option and factory reset everything including the routers. Kept the bandwidth to 20mhz on the 2.4. UPnP off. Kitchen wired to the first node. Nothing connected to the master. Seems to be behaving for the moment as I can see all speakers from each node. Crossed fingers it continues. Downside is 2 speakers are now in the red on the matrix as the kitchen isn’t close to them. I’ll see how it goes and decide if I risk plugging hallway back in. 

Thanks again and have a Happy Easter. 

I have exactly the same issue :( 

Just tried resetting all of the Sonos kit and using a wired One SL near the main router. Everything seems to be connectiong via the Sonos WiFi but still having exactly the same issue! When I am on my phone connected to a Mesh router I cannot see the Sonos devices furthest from the main router If I move rooms and my phone connects to the WiFi from the main router I can see evrything!

Mine was also working a few weeks back.

Got some progress. I disabled the SmartConnect feature on the ASUS router and setup seperate 2.4 and 5ghz. The Sonos kit is connected throught the house on the 2.4 as is the phone, this works perfectly so far!

Hi @AndrewRC and @LTTB 

I use an Asus Ai-Mesh with three (3) AC5300 Tri-Band routers. I need better Wi-Fi coverage for streaming Apps, AppleTV’s, cameras, Amazon devices, IoT’s and outdoor coverage for my Moves. 

I paid BestBuy Geek Squad to run Ethernet from the main to the two nodes for a stronger Backhaul. I still run my Sonos over the SonosNet. Below are my settings for the Ai-Mesh.

Hi @AjTrek1 

Thanks for your advice that seems to have done the job Some of your settings are not availble, specifying the Channel Bandwidth. But updating the Professional section to match yours has done the trick :)

Thanks 

Paul

@AjTrek1 Thanks for the info, appreciated. The settings available on the 68U are quite different but since I’ve reset from scratch last weekend things have settled down. What I’ve got matches your settings apart from the 2.4Ghz channel bandwidth setting. Cable from the primary to any other node isn’t practical. It would mean lifting flooring or chasing into 100 year old plaster & lathe walling. (plus lifting wall tiles in the kitchen.) I will soon have cable backhaul from the kitchen router (node2) to the shed (node3), so that should improve things there. The cabling will also let me connect the most remote speaker directly to the kitchen speaker which is the “master” and connected to node2. (running 4 cat6 lines for redundancy) The shed speaker still has a nasty habit of dropping out of groups and/or vanishing altogether for periods of time but hopefully the cabling will cure that. It is at the extreme range for distance and 250mm thick brick wall. 

So for me, this is what seems to be working for now. Previous “fixes” seemed to last a few weeks then things go squirrely again. 

1: master speaker for SonosNet connected to node1 and not the main router.

2: 2.4ghz bandwidth narrowed to 20mhz as per @ratty ‘s suggestion. 

3: All speakers reset and wifi ssid removed. 

4: upgraded the ASUS firmware to latest and made sure all nodes match.

5:Upgraded Sonos and apps to latest version. 

6: AI mesh connecting through 5Ghz. 

7: 2.4Ghz on channel 11, SonosNet on channel 6. (Channel 1 around here is swamped)

@AndrewRC 

I didn’t think you’d have the exact same setup pages (options) as my AC5300. I just posted them for reference.

Wiring two satellites I don’t think (and I could be mistaken) will provide any improvement as they are manged by the main router. Each node acquires clients as they move into their vicinity such as with a cell phone. Otherwise their clients are static such as with a smart TV (that doesn’t move). The advantage of the ASUS Ai-Mesh is that it’s self-healing. If one satellite goes down the other (or main) will acquire the client until things are corrected. 

In any event it’s good to know that your Sonos is more stable. Cheers!

So the two things that I did on my Asus router to get my mobile devices to connect correctly and see all speakers (note this was the hammer method, I am sure this thread has some better tweaks). My issue was, depending on where I was in the house I would see some of the speakers but not all, or I could see the system but controls did not work (change volume, no change occurs) or I would just get a cannot connect to wi-fi. I did the following:

• Turned off Airtime Fairness for both 2.4 and 5 AND
• Turned off Smart Connect

I have been running this setup for 4 days now and have not seen an issue. Note that I run my Asus in Access Point mode, with another vendor supplier router as the primary. I had an RT-AC86U but recently upgraded to an RT-AX88U. I seldom saw these issue with the 86 (I did have issues though) but the new 88 I would get it almost everyday.

According to the ASUS website the smart connect feature is kind of a gimmick, because it cannot do true load balancing, it can only switch a user based on signal strength alone. I have seen no degradation of service with this mode off.