Hi @speabody
Welcome to the Sonos Community!
It’s difficult to say for sure, and that’s exactly why we don’t support extenders. Sure, they are the cheapest option, but that in itself kind of says a lot. You can always try, and return it to the store if it doesn’t work as intended. As you have a Boost, the speakers will not use the extender and that will prevent many issues that an extender can create. With only the controller connecting to the extender you may still get some problems, but they won’t affect playback performance - just control. You may get slow responses, occasional “can’t connect” messages, or rooms missing from the app, but still able to play (from a button press or voice command, for example).
I’d recommend you invest in a mesh WiFi system as these are much more robust. They typically come as three units and thus aren’t particularly cheap, unfortunately. You get what you pay for, as with most things. Alternatively, some routers have mesh functionality built-in, and you then just need to add the right number of compatible nodes to suit your needs.
If you use one of the music services listed on our Stream audio to Sonos from another app page, like Spotify, you could actually use their app to control your Sonos system while in the garden, as long as you are able to connect to mobile/cellular data on your controller device. As these Direct Control services operate via the cloud to play to Sonos, you don’t need to be connected to your network to play, just to the internet. Your data allowance won’t be used up by the actual music streams, as the speakers fetch the stream themselves through their own connection.
I hope this helps.
@Corry P : is there not a way to use a cheap extender in a way that works for control purposes by maybe turning off DHCP on it?
Also, using something like Spotify connect in the manner you suggest will not allow volume control to work...
Hi @Kumar
If it has that option, maybe, but none that I have come across do - to be honest, DHCP doesn’t seem congruous with “cheap extender”. The issue tends to be with them converting multicast packets to unicast ones and halving available bandwidth, as far as I am aware.
One unit may work without issues, whereas another that on paper seems the same, won’t. It varies.
By way of an update to the linked topic: the 850 units referred continue to work well without troubling Sonos play...
