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I bought my son a Sonos Beam for Christmas.  He lives in his fraternity house but all devices must connect to campus wifi - devices with an operating system like phones, laptops, etc. connect to one.  Devices without an operating system - soundbars, playstation, Alexa, etc. connect to the other.

Is there any way to use the Sonos Beam for anything other than a tv soundbar without access to wifi?  There is no way his phone (iPhone) and the Beam can be set up on the same network.  They do not have ethernet in the fraternity house (old house).   Can you use Airplay 2 to stream from the phone to the Beam without wifi or does that need wifi as well?  If wifi is a must, do they need to be on the same network (my guess would be yes but I don't know)  Looks like the answer was not doable to this a couple of years ago but don't know if things have changed since then.  

Trying to avoid shipping it back to sonos!

There is no clean way to accomplish this. One approach is to use a travel router for BEAM. This would provide an Internet connection for BEAM and BEAM could use online music services. The “Mess” part has two components. First, the phone would need to be switched to the private travel router WiFi when controlling BEAM and the campus WiFi police might come knocking if they take offense to your private WiFi.

As you noted, BEAM can be configured for Autoplay of the TV. Airplay2 requires a WiFi connection to BEAM’s network. Another way of saying this is that BEAM and the iPhone must be on the same Subnet.

It may be worth contacting the campus WiFi administrator and check their policy with respect to travel routers.

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