Question

Sonos, Move, new home Mesh wifi - lots of issues

  • 19 April 2020
  • 7 replies
  • 736 views
S

Hi all

 

My older Sonos system worked fine. Playbar, 2 play 5 gen 1 and a zp80. I have virgin media and used an ASUS RT60 as a repeater as the house is big enough to need help with a stronger WiFi signal. 
 

I decided to upgrade, using the original upgrade program, to two play 5 gen 2, a Port and a Move. (I will pass over the annoyances in Sonos changing the policy to allow older devices to be kept/used). 
 

At the same time I also bought a Tenda MW6 mesh system for my house, with 3 units. They are in bridge mode and I was using the virgin modem router alone as a router (not the ASUS). 
 

I engaged with Sonos support as when I connected two devices with cables, my network went down. Turns out the virgin modem is poor so I connected the ASUS again and ran the virgin unit in modem mode. No more crashing, all good. 
 

However, I’m finding that the Move - which has to connect to the WiFi rather than SonosNet - is causing issues. Issues listed below:

 

  • I’ve had devices disappear momentarily. In fairness I’ve not had that since I added an old bridge into the system. 
  • slow to incredibly slow skipping songs with a huge lag before the Album art from deezer shows. Often improves if I restart the app but that’s annoying 
  • slow app in general - sometimes I’ll start the app and will see a series of grey lines moving across the screen where the devices I own would usually show. Others it will just have the spinning circle in the middle whilst it’s thinking what to do 
  • inconsistent Move behaviour in terms of its readiness or availability

 

I tried completely disconnecting the Move once and it 

seemed to improve matters but I’ve not tried that for a while. 
 

Right now I have a bridge hardwired to my network, as is the connect and Port. I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas what could be causing my intermittent problems. So right now my phone is connected to the main Mesh unit (the one hardwired to my router) and the app appears to work normally. If the phone is connected to a different Mesh unit it definitely shows the above traits, albeit inconsistently. 
 

any ideas? 
 

thanks and sorry for the long post. 

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7 replies

S

One more detail/issue. Just came back home after leaving music playing. Went into app. Skipped track and the art didn’t change. Then paused it. Wouldn’t recommence the track playing. Shut down app (iOS) and when I restarted Sonos had forgotten what I was playing (Deezer flow). This happens a fair bit. 

Ken_Griffiths

sean_leeds,

As you are using VirginMedia as your ISP, I would switch their superhub 2, or 3, over to modem mode. Then cable your Tenda mesh system primary hub to the VM modem.

Wire a single Sonos device to run off that Tenda hub as the SonosNet ‘root bridge‘ and ensure the following..

  1. That the Tenda 5ghz and 2.4ghz WiFi SSID’S each have different names and their WiFi  channels are fixed and non-overlapping and operating the same across all hubs/satellites. So for example you could have MyWifiName-2G on fixed channel 6 operating on every Tenda access point and MyWifiName-5G on fixed channel 48 on every Tenda access point.
  2. Ensure the SonosNet channel, in the App, is set at least 5 channels away from the chosen 2.4ghz Tenda channel .. so choose either channel 1 or 11 in this given example.
  3. Switch off Your ASUS RT router, it’s unlikely to be required if you place the Tenda satellite stations in strategic places about the Home.
  4. Setup your Sonos Move to operate on your Tenda 5ghz WiFi band.
  5. Remove network references to your Tenda 2.4ghz WiFi in the Sonos App within both these areas…
  • ‘Settings/System/Network/Networks’
  • ‘Settings/System/Network/Wireless Setup’

Hopefully all should then work fine. 👍 

Ken_Griffiths

How to switch the VM superhubs to modem mode…

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/virgin-media-hub-modem-mode 

Setup your primary Tenda Hub as your main router/gateway/DHCP server.  

S

Hi

Thanks for that.  A few points:

virgin hub already in modem mode. Tenda in bridge mode
tenda doesn’t allow different SSIDs for 5 ghz and 2.4ghz

asus needed as i need a static IP for my NAS, which tenda doesn’t permit, hence bridge mode 

Cannot chose tenda channel but it’s fixed at 6 for 2.4ghz.  I set Sonos to 11.

 

I’m pretty convinced it’s the Move causing issues.  For example, the latest slowness in the app (even registering a press to skip track leads to the spinning circles) has now gone.  Why?  Well the move has over 90% power yet, showing as available but I couldn’t group anything with it.  After trying it went offline.  Then it came back online. App responsiveness is fine again.

 

the whole point of getting the mesh system is so I can use Sonos in the garden without worries.  I realise that as a cheap mesh system without even some basic features like splitting 2.4 and 5ghz this could be the issue.  But after reading up on a few mesh systems, this isn’t unusual.  

 

ratty
  • The ASUS box is evidently there to assign a fixed/reserved IP to the NAS. In that case are all the Sonos devices similarly configured with reserved addresses?
  • Is the Tenda’s fixed 2.4GHz channel 20MHz or 40MHz in width?
  • The Bridge is old tech and is now ‘legacy’. It uses SonosNet 1.0 and the PSUs have a proclivity for failing with age. Post a screenshot of the Network Matrix from http://any_player_IP:1400/support/review. The Bridge may be superfluous.
S

Interesting idea about giving static addresses to Sonos kit too. I’ve just done that so will see if it makes a difference. 
 

tenda 2.4ghz is 40mhz. 
 

i’ve disconnected the bridge. 
 

Thanks! Will monitor performance now. 

ratty

Tenda 2.4ghz is 40mhz. 

 

Bad news, unless you can limit it to 20MHz.

If it’s fixed on ch 6 for the primary, the 40MHz secondary could be on ch 2 or on ch 10. The former would cause grief for Sonos on ch 1, the latter for ch 11. Unless you have a WiFi scanner app to identify the secondary channel you’ll need to experiment with the SonosNet channel. 

 

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