SonosNet is a Mystery

@benn600,
I assume that you have Sonos ‘portable’ devices (Move and/or Roam)??, which are not of course able to use SonosNet, which in turn means that you are therefore not able to remove your WiFi credentials from the Sonos setup. 

I guess your speakers are latching onto the stronger Orbi signal and perhaps it’s because your Boost (presumably wired to the Orbi primary hub) is either suffering from interference and is maybe too close to the router (or it’s wired network connection has intermittent issues) and/or it’s operating on the same 2.4Ghz WiFi channel as your Orbi system, or something else is intermittently interfering with its wireless signal, causing your speakers to then jump over to your Orbi WiFi signal instead. 

That’s my guess as to why you are seeing what you are seeing.

My own thoughts and suggestions are to separate out the 2.4Ghz/5Ghz bands on the Orbi system by giving them different names for their SSID’s (if that’s possible with Orbi?) and put the Sonos portable devices onto its 5Ghz band only and remove the 2.4Ghz Orbi credentials from the Sonos App.

Also try a different Ethernet cable (and try other Ethernet ports) for the Boost wired connection and move the Boost well away from the Orbi and all other wireless products to reduce interference.

Set the (2.4Ghz) SonosNet channel in the App to use the least-used channel and if possible set the Orbi WiFi to use the next least-used ‘fixed’ non-overlapping channel, either 1, 6 or 11, but obviously not the same channel as SonosNet. If the Orbi settings allow, also set the channel-width on that band to 20Mhz only.

Another option to perhaps consider (not recommended, but it’s an option) is putting the portable Sonos products onto a separate Sonos Household and then removing the Orbi WiFi credentials from the main Sonos system - but if you decide to explore this possibility, I would suggest you use separate Sonos controllers for each system, but this really is a very last resort-option if your problems do persist.

Are you using any managed network switches? If so, make sure that they are set for STP, not RSTP.

I think that BOOST has an intermittent network connection either because of a hardware failure or bad cable. Also, don’t connect to an Orbi mesh point, go for the primary.

Is the Orbi or gateway in Bridge mode? One of them should be Bridged.

Has the “WiFi” been disabled on any of the Sonos devices in the controller app’s room settings? This has nothing to do with WiFi; it disables SonosNet.

Thanks all!  I have primarily Sonos One’s plus an Amp, 2 Subs, 1 Beam.  I have 2 Roams and 1 Move.  Yes, these require that my WiFi credentials are added to the “system.”  I can’t separate 2.4 and 5 GHz signals on Orbi.  Orbi is in AP Mode because I ONLY use Orbi for Wifi.  Router, DHCP are handled by a Synology router because it’s the only router with a halfway usable reservations interface.

I don’t use any managed switches, but would switch to them if it would definitely help resolve the issues.

I have disabled wifi on some devices but they’re all currently enabled.  So I have to ask: I have a Beam and Sub both plugged into my main root network switches.  Why can’t the Sub be handled over wired and the Beam then create SonosNet?  This is probably the most meaningful piece of information.  If one single device has WiFi disabled, does that disable SonosNet for the entire system?

I think you were right.  I turned wifi on for every device and restarted every device all at the same time.  When it all came back up, it is using my Beam as the primary device and just about every device is connecting to this.  Odd because I think I did these steps with Sonos tech although I don’t think I unplugged every device after doing so.  They need to all come back up fresh.

BUT it is still using my home wifi.  Maybe I can live with that.  It does seem like devices split out over both networks then, therefore doubling throughput using both 2.4ghz networks.

It’s weird to me how WiFi is essential.  Here are some strategies that I have used previously, some successfully others not:

Run an Ethernet cable between two stereo pair speakers and turned wifi on only for the speaker closest to the primary node.  This one speaker handles the data for both.  Why can’t this one speaker receive the stereo audio file and share it with the other speaker?

Plugged surrounds and Sub into a 5-port Ethernet switch and turned wifi off on 2 of the 3, keeping on only on the speaker closest to the inside.  Again, this one speaker handles all the audio traffic and shares the data with the other surround and sub.

When I plugged Sonos speakers into my Orbi nodes (except the primary node) I would turn WiFi off, so they would get their data either directly over hardwired Ethernet to the main node, or over the 5 GHz backhaul.  But WiFi HAS to be turned off or Orbi starts using this Sonos network as the hop up to the main node.

I have found that home WiFi doesn’t allow for one wireless node to string others, so Ethernet between stereo pair or on a headless switch (surrounds/sub) the secondary devices with WiFi off never show up. When SonosNet is working properly, the other nodes work.  So SonosNet must be operating more like a Bridge than a direct node.

This was appealing because I have an Orbi near these other speakers and I tried to reduce load on the SonosNet as much as possible, therefore resulting in benefiting from my 5 GHz backhaul and the SonosNet 2.4 GHz networks.

In my 22 speaker system I have had to mess with things a bit to get reliable streaming of low-latency live sources (HDMI, etc.) and even music often hasn’t been good.  If I started a song everywhere, it would take 1-20 seconds to start on each speaker.  Splitting the load across different mechanisms has seemed to help, and at times introduced other issues.  I’ve found the Sonos Boost to be a totally useless device.  It’s from 2016 so I think using obsolete technology and processing.

One of my rooms has a stereo pair and the right speaker is about 12 feet closer to the main node, so naturally gets a better signal, so why not handle all talking from this.  Just like my left surround is 12 feet closer than the right surround.  These hop-across configurations only work with SonosNet.  Home wifi just connects to each node individually.

Hi.  Could you please clarify what you mean by ‘it is still using my home wifi’.  Do you mean that some speakers still show as WM=1 in About My System?

SonosNet is not really a separate network.  Once you wire a Sonos device and thus invoke SonosNet. there are two wireless segments to your LAN - WiFi and SonosNet.  Your router (or other DHCP server) still handles IP addressing etc for the whole network.  It is just that data flows between Sonos devices use SonosNet rather than WiFi.

It may be helpful to note that the device from which you initiate a group acts as the ‘group coodinator’.  The more robust the signal to this device, the more stable the group will be, so the choice of first device can be quite significant.

In a stereo pair it is always the left speaker that acts as the co-ordinator for the pair.

If one speaker in a pair is close to a mesh WiFi node and connects that way, and the other speaker connects over SonosNet, instability is likely.

I was just wondering what has happened to the Sonos Boost? It has been mentioned that the Orbi system is set to operate in Bridge mode itself and that all hubs are acting merely as wireless access points to the Synology router, which rightly has its own WiFi switched off, so I was expecting to see the Boost wired to the Synology ‘Router’ and no Sonos products wired to any of the Orbi hubs at all? At least that would have been my chosen setup with the WiFi adapter enabled on all Sonos products.

I would also (for good measure) reserve all the Sonos IP addresses in the Synology’s DHCP Reservation Table.

If there are wired ‘unmanaged’ switches that then are cabled directly back to the Synology router, then I would wire other Sonos products to those switches too (but only if they are wired), such as the main player in a Sonos Home theatre setup (I would never wire it’s surrounds or Sub) and then just leave the portable devices like Move/Roam running on the Orbi WiFi.

So I would not cable anything (Sonos) to the Orbi Hubs at all - that would be my chosen way forward with the setup mentioned.

This should be fine.

No. It disables the radio on that specific device. If it’s the sole wired device then SonosNet won’t be established.

This shouldn’t happen, unless the SonosNet signal is compromised, by distance or interference. Devices should prefer SonosNet over WiFi.

It can. I’ve used this method for years. Of course the speaker with the live radio has to be on SonosNet, not WiFi. WiFi-connected devices have disabled Ethernet ports.

Many mesh WiFis use a form of STP which fights with SonosNet’s own flavour. The result is that the SonosNet wireless can claim priority over the mesh’s wireless backhaul. Bridging via SonosNet would be very slow. Wiring Sonos units to mesh satellites is not recommended.

This sounds like the point I made above, namely that the Ethernet ports are disabled when a Sonos device connects to WiFi instead of SonosNet.

It isn’t. Something else is going wrong. 

See above.

To be honest, I suspect you may have been overthinking things a bit and trying to fight SonosNet. It’s unfortunate that the presence of the Move/Roam necessitates WiFi, and that the Orbi prevents separate band naming, otherwise you could clear the 2.4GHz WiFi from Sonos and avoid devices attempting to connect to WiFi. In your shoes I’d be tempted to wire a couple of 5GHz-only APs to Orbi nodes and run a parallel 5GHz SSID for the Sonos portables.

By disabling some of the SONOS radios you are trying to second guess the SonosNet topology. In my experience this can lead to issues. In my opinion the only case where disabling some radios is productive is when a pile of SONOS units is mounted in a rack. Here, wiring the units to a switch and disabling all but one radio in the pile is helpful.