Some people choose to wire all their speaker, or use the Arc as the source of SonosNet for their Sonos system.

If your system works without issue, there is no benefit over wiring versus WiFi connection, if you’re not trying to do either of the above.

Hi @browndk26 

Thanks for your post!

@Airgetlam has answered your question, but please be aware that 18” is much too close - your router should not have any WiFi-enabled devices within 3 feet of it - any closer, and your WiFi (and the device) will suffer.

Please don’t take this as an instruction to ethernet-wire your Arc - doing so will not prevent it from broadcasting 5GHz for the Sub to connect to, not should you tell the Arc to disable it’s WiFi. My only recommendation is that you move your router away from your Arc (and TV) - doing so will improve WiFi performance for all devices.

I hope this helps.

Appreciate the advice. My tv is connected via Ethernet, as is every possible device that can be wired in my home. My arc has not had any WiFi drops. All my Sonos speakers show connected to my router. So how can the sub be connected to the arc?
 

So why does the arc have an Ethernet port if it won’t broadcast a WiFi signal to the sub if the Ethernet port is used?

I’m anal with respect to wired connections. Whenever practical, I’ll wire. That said, WiFi6 and the soon to break out WiFi7, are more capable than the previous WiFi versions. SONOS is very “chatty” on the network and each speaker is vying for attention, along with the phones, pads, TV’s, thermostats, cameras, etc. Wired SONOS units reduce WIFi traffic and enables SonosNet which further reduces the WiFi load.

The SONOS soundbars use a private 5GHz wireless link to SUB, not WiFi. You can wire SUB if you like.

At inception in 2005, WiFi was not as capable as modern WiFi and SonosNet was a big deal. Regular WiFi did not have the capability to run a large wireless SONOS system. In fact the original SONOS units did not support WiFi because it was pointless. Home WiFi mesh systems did not yet exist and sometimes it was productive to wire a computer or TV to a player and share the SONOS mesh. Since at least one SONOS unit must be wired to support SonosNet, the competition started bashing SONOS, accusing SONOS of lying about being “wireless”. Meanwhile, the competition was struggling with getting their own “wireless” systems to work reliably. Eventually, SONOS relented and enabled WiFi support — instantly deflating the competition’s claim. It was a cheap trick for SONOS. Now, SonosNet is slower than modern WiFi and much of that early advantage no longer applies. The new ERA units and the portables do not support SonosNet.

WIFi is and always will be victimized by range, thick floors and walls, and interference from other nearby devices, but you probably don’t need to be as anal as I am about network wiring.

I think you may have possibly misunderstood a couple of things here, wiring the Sonos Arc does not auto-disable it’s WiFi adapters, but advice was given suggesting you do not manually disable the adapters, as they are needed for a 5Ghz ad-hoc wireless connection between the HT device and any surrounds or Sub.

It’s good in any event to keep your router at least 1 metre away from the Arc (that’s even if you do decide to cable it) so that it does not interfere with the 5Ghz ad-hoc wireless communication.

Note too, that a wired Sonos product with wireless adapters enabled will cause ‘some’ other Sonos rooms around the Home, connected over wireless, to switch to using a SonosNet wireless signal, rather than your router WiFi - So if you have other Sonos products that can use SonosNet, then it’s best to set your routers 2.4Ghz band to use a non-overlapping wireless channel 1, 6 or 11 and set the SonosNet channel in the Sonos App network settings to a completely different channel.

Hope that assists you further.

I may try wiring the arc to the router. I have a mesh routing system so my Wi-Fi signal strength shouldn’t be an issue. 1 gigabit internet service. 

The one gigabit claim is to your router, not the network inside the home, for what that’s worth.