Well I changed the extender SSID name, no worries.

But in the S2 phone app, things are weird now, I went to network to add the HighChaparral network but shows a PLAY3 and asks me to chose it.

I did that and it now asks if I want to add the play3 device to HighChaparral - but I don’t, the PLAY3 devices are working fine on SonosNet, I just wanted the apps current listed channel to be changed.

Anyway, instead I removed the wifi SSID HighChaparral_2.4 from the app so that it only listed SonosNet.

I’m now readding the ROAM and its going better, told me it needs to update the roam and asked for the password for HighChaparral - which is now the SSID for casita and house HighChaparral_2GEXT has gone.

Its updating now…

OK done, at last!

The roam appears in desktop app and phone and is playing music again.

Man oh man oh man, what a labor intensive operation, thanks to everyone in this thread, your posts and encouragement were of huge value!

Indeed, same to you buddy!

Thanks Ken, I do appreciate your help here, despite my grumbling, none of that is directed at you of course, just expressing my frustration!

Thanks

Next year I’m gonna dump that old gateway (DSL, but that’s my only option) and get the newer ones that support 5G too.

As it stands you have to reboot the Roam to get it to connect to a different access point. 

On the extender issue, Sonos seems remarkably cunning in detecting the presence of one and complaining when players are grouped. (Pushing past the nag, the group may still work okay.) This restriction doesn’t apply to controllers connecting via an extender, nor should it apply when APs have a meshed backhaul.

One passing comment: the OP’s DHCP server is supplying two DNS addresses. One is the gateway’s DNS forwarder as usual, but the other is an ISP’s DNS (CenturyLink). If the ISP is CenturyLink this feels like a waste of time, as the gateway would quite probably be using the same external DNS.

Assuming redundancy is required it would be better to specify something like Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8) instead.

Are you running an S1 Sonos system, an S2 Sonos system, or both? If you don't know the answer to that question or what the question means, then I think we have found the source of your problems. 

Alright Ken, all sorted, cycling the power did the trick. I was reluctant to try anything without asking simply because I’d dread having to re-setup all of that c**p over again!

Thx

The SonosNet channel in the iPhone S2 app is set to 1 and I think it has been throughout this excercise.

I tried setting up again but same behavior, never appears in System tab of S2 app.

Here’s a source of confusion for me, the iPhone connects to the strongest SSID so that varies as I move from house to casita.

The S2 app also has network settings and I have no idea what this mean, in my app it says under Network Settings one network - HighChaparral_2GEXT. 

What is this? the app runs on the phone so will leverage its internet services, so why does the app even care about SSID? 

If two of my PLAY3 devices are in the house near HighChaparral and the other two are in the casita near HighChaparral_2GEXT then why does the app list just a single SSID? what does the app do with that SSID? 

I can see Update Networks and when I select that I get a question about do I want to add a trusted network and so on, if I click Yes it says “Make sure all your products are powered on, this could take 1 - 2 minutes”.

I’m concerned that this might upset the entire system after all the effort it took to get the PLAY3 devices connected.

Without documentation for this all and all these options and setting, this becomes a guessing game.

I would just call your router and extender access points HighChapparall_2G for their 2.4Ghz bands and set those to fixed channel 11, rather than ‘Auto’. 

Similarly, just call your router and extender access points HighChapparall_5G for their 5Ghz bands and set those to fixed channel(s) too, rather than ‘Auto’.   

Add both bands/SSID’s to your Sonos App network settings as mentioned previously - if problems persist, then it will likely be that SSDP multicast discovery/broadcast is not working correctly over the entire subnet, either between the two bands, and/or between the two different access points, which is not unheard of with a few devices …and there maybe other settings available on your router/access point that ‘may’ need to be set, such as IGMP snooping, or in some cases you may have to enable multicast and broadcast data if that is set to ‘disabled’ on the device by default ( …just as examples of some device settings).

Finally, channel 1 for SonosNet for all the non-portable Sonos devices should be fine.

I hope that information assists.

OK I can see that all the PLAY3 devices are connected to the SSID in the house - HighChaparral - despite the app knowing only about HighChaparral_2GEXT.

Even the PLAY3 devices in the casita (where HighChaparral is weak and HighChaparral_2GEXT is strong) are connected to HighChaparral the weaker of the two SSIDs.

Those devices were connected using the phone while I was in the casita too.

This is so so bewildering...

Thanks Ken, I will play around with this some more, but my wife and I also use the wifi for work and I’m hesitant to make adjustments like this sometimes, hate to mess up everything else that’s working.

So in your experience its fine to have the SSID the same for the router and the extender? (for a given frequency band I mean).

We have TVS and stuff all setup so adjusting these name is possible, it might be my best bet for now to just adjust the HighChaparral_2GEXT in the extender to be named HighChaparral the router also only supports 2.4 GHz.

That way only casita stuff might be impacted and the only 5G access anyway is via the extender so leaving that as is makes sense.

OK here’s some details:

This is the wifi settings for the main house router, I don’t care that you can see the SSID name, I’m past caring!

Here are the settings for the extender a Netgear WN2500RP:

These are the settings that have been in place for several years.

Aren’t those non-portable devices using a SonosNet signal? I thought you had one device wired?

This is a huge problem IMHO, with modern computer centric products. The user is often compelled to resort to experimentation, trial and error using a mix of judgement and experience to resolve issues.

Familiar questions like “did you try resetting” or “did you pull the power cord” or “have you tried resetting your router” and so on.

These really indicate to me that the company - Sonos - does not have a firm grip on the technology, not sufficient anyway to make customers lives much easier.

I’m a competent software engineer, decades of experience and a former hardware engineer with significant experience of radio, audio, radio, digital and analog electronics and even I get frustrated like hello with all this.

It seems Sonos just don’t care, it’s not important and can I blame them? most computer based products today are like this, designed to work easily for the simplest configurations but simply not caring when things are out of the ordinary.

The crazy thing is that if Sonos did invest more effort in these areas they’d start to reap benefits like:

1. Customer support calls would be both fewer in number and less difficult to resolve.
2. Their own staff would benefit in their ability to test these products as they enhance them.

For example a “debug sonos” app or mode might be hugely helpful in that it could gather lots of data about the user’s network(s) channels, attached devices etc etc etc and make it much easier to identify conflicts or poorly set configuration.

If my ROAM doesn’t appear in my S2 app then why not leverage the fact that the app was able to communicate with the ROAM because I was able to go through the ROAM setup? Why can’t the app connect to the ROAM over bluetooth and interrogate it as a an aid to understanding the problem?

There is no way at all that I can “see” inside the ROAM to see what it is doing or anything.

Perhaps its time to run the old Intel UPnP power tools...

In the past all my WiFi access points had the same name/SSID for their 2.4Ghz band - Localnet_2G …and the 5Ghz band was called - Localnet_5G, I didn’t want my ‘Move’ device to use the 2.4Ghz band, so I put that on the 5Ghz band only. I therefore just added the Localnet_5G to my Sonos system via the network settings in the App.. however all my non-portable devices ran on SonosNet, rather than my WiFi - I just mainly used the access points for connecting my controller (and the Move) to the LAN.

Of course network changes can take a while to do sometimes - I’m just offering some suggestions but it’s entirely upto you what bits you choose to take onboard - I’m just trying to provide you with some suggestions, that’s all.

I think having the casita 2.4GHz SSID and password the same as that for the main router is the way to go.  Then have that as the only network in the Sonos app.

@Korporal - please then check in the app Settings under ‘About My System’.  All the speakers should have WM=0 next to them (indicates SonosNet) except for the Move, which should show WM=1.

Yes, that’s interesting I may have been hasty, I just checked again here’s what I actually see:

Three zone players connected to the network:

Now, this is most odd:

According to the router the same three zone players are all connected via ethernet not wifi !!

But only one is connected by cable the other two are definitely connected over wifi, they are in the casita with me now!

So this is the actual status of these.

I am supposing that the wired device is well, wired and the other two are connecting to that unit over the artifical “SonosNet” wifi network that I saw mentioned during setup, that is “mesh” I am guessing, the wired PLAY3 is generating a distinct SSID (but I can’t see it listed on my phone...)

For that reason they appear as devices that are connected via the physical LAN cable, this seems to explain what I’m seeing.

This article is shedding more light on this for me too:

https://livingspeaker.com/what-is-sonosnet/#:~:text=SonosNet%20is%20a%20type%20of,the%20router%20through%20Ethernet%20cable.

I reran the ROAM setup from the iPhone app and during that I used the spy tool to rescan the network. At no point did the ROAM appear on the network, not even after the iPhone said that device had been connected to HOUSE_2GEXT.

OK they do all have WM:0 (all three) as for the ROAM that is yet to appear, it has not appeared on the network despite many attempts.

I’ll do as suggested later, rename the extender SSID for 2.4 GHZ to be the same as main gateway’s SSID (they already share the same password).

Thx

@Korporal 

Yes it’s often the case that some routers (not all), may see the SonosNet wireless devices, as ‘wired’, as the communication with the router is via the wired ‘root bridge’ Sonos device - you can tell (easily) if the non-portable Sonos devices are correctly running on SonosNet by going to the ‘about box’ in the Sonos app and looking at their Wireless Mode (WM) setting - if running on SonosNet the devices will have WM: 0 next to them in the device list.

In an ‘ideal’ Sonos setup, what most users aim for is the controller mobile device attached to the same access point linked to the wired ‘root bridge’ device. If the mobile controller switches to a different WiFi access point altogether, which has a different SSID (as you have in your own current setup) then the Sonos App will see this as a different Wifi network and look for devices that are then on that network, which might not be any, if you do not have that SSID stored in your network settings in the Sonos App.

I would personally choose to add that network SSID to your list of networks in your Sonos App network settings - in my own case, I prefer to have the same SSID name for all the WiFi access points on the network, but people have varying views about this.
 

That said, the most important factor is that all Sonos devices and controllers must be on the same network subnet and the communication across all needs to support SSDP multicast/broadcast for the discovery of the devices. This is usually simple in a single central wifi access point network, but it can become more complex in some cases, where different access points form part of the network that use different SSID’s and WiFi channels/channel-widths, as the communication can become interrupted.

Hmm, when I attempt to edit the name of the SSID of the the extender’s 2.4 GHz this warning popup appears:

It will let me change it, but I’m reluctant, like this model may have limitations and so on...