Contributor I

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Unable to AirPlay to Era 100 in separate VLAN (Ubiquity)

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I have a Ubiquity Unifi network with a separate VLAN for my Sonos speakers. They all work perfectly fine (set on SonosNet) + a Roam on WiFi, except for the Era 100 (which is connected to ethernet with the Sonos Combo Adapter). I am unable to connect any device via AirPlay. When I move the Era back into LAN (same VLAN as other devices) it works instantly.

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Stanley_4Answer

Grand Maestro

Sonos needs to be on a single network

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K

kepik

Lyricist II

I just bought into the Sonos system last week with just an Arc Ultra and am in the same boat with you. Unifi network with the Arc Ultra being on my IoT VLAN. Airplay works fine for my other devices in the VLAN, AppleTV 4K and Sony Bravia TV. I can still access the Arc on the Sonos app as well as use Spotify Connect. Even Home Assistant detects any settings changes with the speaker.

Of course, If my phone is on the same VLAN as the Arc, Airplay works perfectly fine.

T

tim_p

Lyricist III

Hey Sonos,

The behavior I described above breaks Airplay when it was working previously. Is this change intentional on the part of Sonos, or was this an accidental change that will be reverted in a future release?

Cheers!

K

kingebeng

Trending Lyricist I

Sonos any reply would be appreciated!!!!!!

Stanley_4

Grand Maestro

Since this is a user to user community replies from Sonos should not be expected.

Contacting Support is the way to get a Sonos response.

N

Niels Harre

Lyricist I

I recently bought my couple of Era 100s. If I knew this would be a challenge I’d never bought them. No problem with my Five or Arc playing across VLAN.

I am very dissatisfied with the Era 100 and the network implementation. Don’t buy them is my recommendation.

When time is due to replace my Arc + Sub + Play 1’s in our home theater I will certainly look at other vendors. Having been a long time (+15 years) user of different Sonos products time is now to look in other directions.

Would I recommend Sonos? Absolutely no. Not anymore unfortunately.

U

UltraPhonic

Lyricist II

I updated to today’s device update (82.2-59204) but still Airplay is broken to my ERA100’s and continues to work to my Arc. Other services continue to work to the ERA100’s so it just seems to be Airplay affected again.

Has anyone had any joy with this update please?

J

Jorge Rui

Lyricist I

Spent a little time digging into the issue. To recap, though, everything was working fine until the `81.1-58210` software release which was installed across my system on Oct 21st. Airplay across VLANs worked fine with all speakers; after the system update, Airplay across VLANs stopped working with the newer speaker hardware.

The issue is that the Precision Time Protocol service does not start up properly on the newer speakers. When an Airplay stream is initiated, the sending device contacts the speaker on port 7000. As the devices negotiate the Airplay protocol, the Airplay device starts sending PTPv2 packets to ports 319 and 320 on the Sonos speakers. The speaker initially responds with some ICMP “port unreachable” responses because the Precision Time Protocol service is still starting up, but eventually the speaker starts sending back PTPv2 packets so the devices can coordinate on time and account for audio delay.

The newer Sonos speakers never send PTPv2 packets in response. The Airplay device is sending these packets to coordinate on time, but the Sonos speaker always responds with the ICMP “port unreachable” packets - it never starts listening for these PTPv2 packets.

Again, this only happens across VLANs - if both devices are on the same subnet, then the issue does not happen.

For corporate environments (retailers, etc) keeping devices like Sonos speakers, lighting systems, etc separate from the point-of-sale terminals is very important from a security perspective. For home users, this security by separation is just as important especially with some work-from-home environments.

Hopefully this is an error / oversight and not an intentional change by Sonos, and hopefully Sonos can remedy the situation in a future software update.

PS - If any engineers at Sonos stumble across this thread, please feel free to contact me directly and I can provide some tcpdump packet captures that illustrate the issue. The initial Airplay handshake with the speaker is successful; the speaker just never responds to PTPv2 packets on ports 319 or 320.

Cheers!

Just registered to say thank you for your profound investigation

K

kepik

Lyricist II

The latest firmware update apparently has now allowed the desktop app to be able to find my system when I’m on my main VLAN. Previously, I had to be on the IoT VLAN for the desktop app to see it. Reading what tim_p wrote, that explains maybe why my I’m unable to Airplay to the Arc Ultra as that is newer hardware.

F

FedUpCustomer

Lyricist III

Here’s my theory: Sonos intentionally broke AirPlay over VLAN on the current Era 100 so that they can include it as a feature in the Era 100 Pro.

T

tim_p

Lyricist III

And the saga continues! I have contacted Sonos technical support.

1 - The phone support connects you with a call center where the people working there can barely hear what you are saying because of the large amount of background noise. It took 50 minutes on hold to finally be connected with a person. I could hear about seven different background conversations, and I had to repeat myself at least three times for every question the support technician asked.

2 - After 30 minutes on the phone where the support technician reads from the support documents you can find online, I finally asked them to escalate the issue to the next level support team. The problem is they had a very old email in their system that I no longer use. I had changed my email address with Sonos over three years ago, but this old email showed up in the support system.

3 - I had to contact Sonos support again through the chat window and update my email address with them that way. The chat system is just a robot - you have to explicitly ask to talk to a person who can then help you.

4 - It has now been over a week, and I have not heard anything from Sonos at all. Not even an acknowledgement that this support ticket exists and that the ticket is in a queue to be looked at.

5 - Contacted the Sonos support chat system again today to ask for a status. They have no idea when it will get looked at, nor do they have any estimate on the timeline.

So I’m in support limbo at the moment. Someone might look at the issue or they might not. Someone might send me an email or they might not.

Sonos might care about customer support, or they might not.

If anyone on the forums here tells you to contact Sonos support, this is what you get to look forward to.

Cheers, and Happy Holiday!

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