Sky Q and Sonos problems

Hi all, thanks for your discussion surrounding this issue!

As has been mentioned, SkyQ systems - when in use with a Sky router - can have some trouble passing certain types of network traffic through, specifically the kind that allows your app to find the system - causing you to only see Sonos speakers connected to the same SkyQ box as your phone/tablet, or being unable to connect at all.
Given that this happens due to a failure on the mesh WiFi created by SkyQ there's not a lot we can do to prevent this issue from developing, however there are ways to work around the issue.

The following only applies when you have both SkyQ and a Sky router;

What we can do to work around the issue is make some changes to the network setup, such that you can force Sonos and your phone/tablet to connect to the main routers WiFi, and not the WiFi provided by the SkyQ boxes.

The first step here is to "split" the network in to separate 2.4 and 5GHz wireless networks by accessing the router settings - you can find some steps on making this change here.

I would recommend leaving the 2.4GHz wireless name the same, and simply add "-5" to the 5GHz wireless name.

After splitting the network, the next step is to disable the 2.4GHz radio on each SkyQ box via the engineers menu - you can find out how to do this here.

When finished;

-Sonos will be configured for the 2.4GHz wireless only.
-SkyQ boxes will broadcast 5GHz only
-Main router will broadcast both 2.4GHz and 5GHz
-When connected to the 2.4GHz, your phone/tablet will always be connected via the routers WiFi.

This should allow you to consistently connect to and control all Sonos devices within the home, as we are no longer relying on the SkyQ boxes to pass through discovery messages.

I fail to see why this marked as “answered” by anyone other than the OP.

Its not answered and we are still working at it.

This post only applies to people with the issue here whom use both Sky’s broadband and Sky Q based whole home wifi and have put their own 3rd party equipment between any Sky equipment.

It presents what may turn out to be a better fix than suggested by Sonos as it does not involve disabling parts of the Sky Q service through the engineer menu and loosing out on this.

tl;dr - Do not connect Sky Q equipment together with 3rd party fast (10/100) ethernet switches or powerline adapters that have only fast ports and expect it not to break Sonos!

Sky do not recommend connecting anything (including switches) between their boxes:

https://www.sky.com/help/diagnostics/sky-q-permanent-connectivity/are-you-using-powerline-equipment

If you must then then do it with any of these:

• A wire (no switch).
• A gigabit switch.
• A pair of powerline adapters with gigabit ports.

Avoid:

• Fast ethernet switch
• Any powerline adapter with only a fast ethernet port.

What’s gigabit got to do with anything?

• Devices with fast ports often do not support adding an extra 14 bytes of data on the wired network between Sky Q boxes necessary to tunnel large Sonos responses about what a speaker is capable of.
• Devices with gigabit ports usually do.

It doesn’t really have anything to do with the speed of the interface per se, just that Sky equipment requires the extra headroom often afforded by Gigabit devices to work 100% correctly and not break things like Sonos.  I can explain in glorious detail if necessary.

That’s interesting. There must be something slightly different about the software running on that device, since most (all?) Sonos devices have a 10/100 ethernet port, not a gigabit port. 

The silly thing is that instead of bridging/forwarding the Sonos messages (frames), instead the Sky Q wraps/tunnels them in its own messages.  If the Sonos frame was already as big as it could be or just below but still totally standard, wrapping it makes the result bigger still.  That is then too big for the switch.

So the Sky Q equipment is making good Sonos traffic into bad traffic for the switch. A normal wireless access point would not to this.  It would just forward the Sonos message to the switch, leaving it alone. It wouldn’t be too big because the Sonos never made it too big in the first place.

Sky Q can get away with this if the Q boxes are connected by Wifi as there is more headroom for the overhead it adds in Wifi than there is in standards based ethernet.  Although still not a standard as such, Gigabit ethernet also tends to have more headroom too and in actual fact often loads, to support what are known as Jumbo frames.  The oversized Sky Q frames would be called “Baby Giant” frames if you had to pick one of the wacky names that have unofficially been used for these non standards. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame#Baby_giant_frames

Over the years various 802.1 protocol standards have come about which reserve more space in ethernet headers not the main message part, but devices don’t police where the bytes end up. So there may well be some fast ethernet devices that were built to support such protocols around that will have enough headroom for Sky Q to work too but I would expect these to be more expensive enterprise devices that people wouldn’t come across in their homes.

The Sonos’s 10/100 port is generally neither here nor there.  Only if you were to put a Sonos with two ports in the centre in order to connect two Sky Q devices (I did this as an experiment) where it was acting as a switch/bridge might you wish the Sonos had Gigabit ports.  Sonos speakers are not designed to be general purpose switches of course so it would be a mistake to use them that way.  In this case, adding Gigabit ports to the Sonos wouldn’t fix anything as it is the fast ethernet switch that has trouble after Sky Q has mangled the Sonos traffic.

I have just got Sky Broadband, was having weird issues where my One’s and Amp were fine, but the Roam was not showing in the app, but was via Airplay, but i could only play either Roam or the others.

Having seen this page, the first thing I did was untick “Synchronise 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Settings” in the Sky router settings and instantly the Roam appeared in the app and is working fine at the moment…

I have not yet received the Sky Q box, but this worked instantly so thought I’d post it.

I have had the same issues. It’s easy to solve…..

With your Sky Q remote scroll down to settings and then press 001 select. 
 

Go to network, and turn off both 2.4 and 5 gig networks. This is assuming you can connect your Q box with an Ethernet cable to the router. 
 

Your Sonos will work perfectly after. 

The only Sonos staff that respond here are the forum moderators. You’d be much more likely to get a response to your diagnostic if you were to call Sonos Support directly to discuss it.

When you speak directly to the phone folks, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and network.