SonosNet is a Mystery

OMG after changing both channels all of my devices switched over to the SonosNet device I wanted and not the crappy boost.  You, sir, and the 10 other people who told me to do so, deserve a fast clap.  I will keep messing with it.

It’s still going strong a few hours later.  I guess it was the channels interfering?  That seems wild that so little could impact so much.  I’ll describe my whole setup later, it’s working exactly as I wanted, just with a slight adjustment.

For half a day now it has been working exactly as I wanted.  It seems like changing the channels of my Orbi and Sonos just made it instantly work.  Which is shocking.  But very awesome, and would explain why sometimes it worked better than others because Orbi was set to automatic.  Although prior to my full reset I did have Orbi pegged to a channel.  So not totally sure about what was breaking that earlier setup.

My high level setup is as follows:

Orbi AC3000 Base with 3 Orbi Satellites (I was an early adopter right when they got introduced, still awesome devices)

All router/DHCP is handled by an awesome Synology router.  All Sonos nodes (and just about everything else) has a reserved IP address in organized blocks.

Amp is plugged into an Orbi satellite and has wifi turned on, to broadcast the precious 5GHz signal to surrounds/sub and the 2.4GHz signal to everything else.  Rear Right has wifi turned on, Right Left/Sub have wifi turned off.  All 3 are plugged into a 5-port unmanaged switch.  Right Rear handles all the wireless traffic for all 3.  I also have a wired sub plugged into the amp.  Wired (coaxial) sub is in the front of the room and the wireless sub is in the rear of the room with the surrounds.

The other two Orbi Satellites each have a stereo pair connected directly with WiFi turned off.  Yes, the loop back issue is a huge issue if wifi isn’t disabled.  Orbi starts thinking it can use the Sonos as backhaul and some of that traffic gets blocked so random devices/requests fail.  Super intermittently bad.  Really would be cool if there was a way to prevent this issue, like making Sonos only support Sonos traffic.  But I’m still all good regardless.

My Orbi Router has a Beam and Sub plugged in (again wifi disabled).  This was previously my main Sonos, but I had to switch to amp because I do rely on wireless surrounds/sub there.

I also have a stereo pair not plugged into any switches, just connected together, with the physically closest speaker having wifi on and the other off.  In addition to 3 single One’s scattered around, of course on SonosNet with no Ethernet cable.  And 1 Move & 2 Roams.

I just prefer hardwired so much that whenever possible I want that handled by the 1.8Gbps Orbi backhaul and not the slower Orbi or Sonos wireless networks.  I thought one speaker would be too far to reach Amp but it’s even showing as green in the status table right now.

My test (since Sonos doesn’t do a single thing to inform users when there is drop out—they should log: 100ms audio dropped on Zone B) is to play an HDMI source everywhere, mute everything, then turn zones up to hear them in the distance and listen for any variation or drop outs.  I run this test frequently when I have everything setup to see if it’s stable and able to handle the challenging task of pushing realtime audios streams everywhere with approaching no drop outs.  Naturally the devices plugged into the Orbi backhaul are rock solid.

So in my huge status table I only have 7 colored boxes, and all are speakers connecting to Amp, all are green except the furthest speaker away which is 50/50 green/yellow.  I have 20 Sonos nodes (3 use home wifi).

Make sure the Orbi is using a 20MHz width channel otherwise it could hit SonosNet. Netgear tends to default to 40MHz.

Not really. Partial overlaps between channels are particularly damaging. And close proximity between an Orbi node and a Sonos component would obviously amplify such effects.

I really don’t see why you insist on this arrangement since you “don’t like having extra hardware if it’s not necessary”. The bandwidth of the 5GHz channel the Amp autoselects for its satellites is more than sufficient to service them all wirelessly.

This would entail deep packet inspection. Never going to happen. Besides, Sonos already stipulates that you shouldn’t wire to multiple WiFi mesh nodes.

Such logs -- for example of packet loss percentages -- exist, but are internal to the system diagnostics, which only Sonos Support now gets to see. You could always run some intensive ping tests of your own.

Not that huge. 😉

Sonos only supports 32 nodes max max, right?  So a few more little additions and I’ll be nearing the physical limit.  Besides, there are like 10 undefined entries, what are these?

I think I have 40mhz channel width.  What does this mean, that of 1/6/11 it spills over into an adjacent channel?  Should I use 1 and 11 only?  Things are so stable and reliable now I don’t want to touch a thing.

My rear right surround is bossy and likes handling communications for the throuple.

When a speaker cuts out 1ms I want to know because it means interference is building of I have a trash implementation.  I want excess bandwidth, capacity, whatever.  That’s why I spent these 50 hours messing with my system to finally have it physically communicating as I know is the most efficient with least network demand at every level.  Perhaps now it can handle anything I throw at it.  I hear the first chord everywhere now.

Correct: 32 nodes max per household.

The undefined entries on the matrix top row? Those could well be devices whose radio is disabled. Check their MAC addresses.

With 40MHz width, the Orbi on 11 will put its secondary channel on 7 so would stomp on SonosNet’s ch 6.

Either confine Orbi to 20MHz width (better solution) or use only chs 1 and 11 (worse solution as it continues to upset any neighbours who use ch 6).

40MHz at 2.4GHz is unsociable and should really never be used,

Totally unnecessary, but whatever.

20 vs 40? Think of a string of adjacent conference rooms in an office. Within each room there is parliamentary procedure such that only one person speaks at a time. Then the “smart guy” in an adjacent room decides that he will amplify his audio, which then breaks through to the adjacent rooms -- decreasing intelligibility. Of course the adjacent rooms could do the same, but because there is no cross room parliamentary procedure, intelligibility across the area tanks. Another way of looking at this is that a window is open in your conference room and there is a construction site next door.

Use 20Mhz on 2.4GHz unless you are so isolated that you need only channels 1 and 11.