You Need Bandwidth To Stream Over Wi-Fi
I’m posting this because I’d like to present you with information regarding wireless streaming of music services and how it relates to the available band width provided by your router. Before I start, I’m going to provide information about my ISP and network setup.
ISP
- Google Fiber
- 3G Plan (incoming)
- $100/mo_USD
My Network
- Wi-Fi 7
- Asus AiMesh with wired backhaul
- Asus GT-BE98 Pro Router (main node)
- Asus RT-BE96U Router x 2 (satellite nodes)
I’ll admit that my setup is not the typical network utilized by most consumers. It is high-end in terms of equipment cost which is approximately $1500_USD and ISP service. However, the principles are the same regarding performance of a network regardless of build and specifications.
This picture shows the Mbps hitting my router for download and upload which is approximately 3G as provided by my ISP Google Fiber. You need to understand that there is no consumer device currently available that can utilize 3G speeds.
A consumer device with a wired connection over ethernet is limited to 10/100/1000 Mbps. The latter number for simplicity represents 1GB. Sonos is only capable of 100Mbps which is more than adequate.
The next picture illustrates what my “high-end” network equipment can provide over Wi-Fi. It may surprise you.
As you can see my network over Wi-Fi can only utilize (broadcast) approximately one third (1/3) of the 3G provided by my ISP. Incidentally, the speed test was taken using my device used for Sonos which is an iPhone 16 ProMax.
To further illustrate what you might realize over Wi-Fi based upon your ISP plan here’s an example from a US based company called Spectrum. Looking at a plan offering 100 Mbps Internet speed you would realize about 33 Mbps through put over Wi-Fi which is one (1/3) third.
This is not to say that you need to upgrade your ISP plan. YMMV in your location with a similar plan.
You might ask yourself why would I invest in expensive high-end network equipment and pay for 3G speed that I can’t completely utilize?
Well, the answer is simple
- I’m a Tech Geek
- I want to future proof my network
- I have many clients on my network to service not counting streaming of music, 4K movies and other data.
The slide below illustrates how many clients I may have “jocking” for bandwidth (wired or over Wi-Fi) at any time. Which at the writing of this post is 57 of which 31 are Sonos.
I might also add that I’ve been streaming Apple Music at Lossless quality via Sonos for over four (4) hours. Time stamp shows 9:22 am_CST. See picture below. It is now 1:50 pm_CST.
Now that I’ve set the stage lets tie this together regarding your network. Using my ISP and network capture as an example you can possibly only hope for one (1/3) third of the bandwidth you pay your ISP to be captured over Wi-Fi, although YMMV. Understand that result must be shared by not only Sonos, but other Wi-Fi clients in your home.
I now want to provide you with some data regarding music streaming services.
As you can see Apple Music uses more Mbps than Spotify. What that means if you are having trouble streaming Apple Music don’t reference Spotify as an example as it uses less bandwidth. Now of course it all depends on the quality of the streaming service your plan provides. Click here to read the full article.
Here's an AI generated explanation of how much incoming speed provided by your ISP is needed to sustain a stream of 7.46Mbps which is what is required by Apple music. Also pay close attention to the last bullet point.
So now looping back to the 100Mbps ISP plan your household may be in good shape for multiple streams. Just know that at any time Wi-Fi interference can affect the quality of your streams in addition to network configuration, type of stream (music, 4K video & data) and client load.
The take away is that drops and/or inability to stream a music service using Sonos in most cases can be traced back to your network and it’s ability to handle the client traffic barring any outages that may be reported by Sonos here