Sonos one speakers wouild not connect to new Netgear Nighthawk router

  • 27 March 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 797 views

In hopes of saving someone hours of their time - got 2 new routers this weekend.  The router supplied by Spectrum is called Sagecom.  Everything at home connected to it except my paired sonos one speakers.  It turns out that Sagecom broadcasts 2.4 ghz and 5 ghz but you cannot select one or the other.  Apparently Sonos one speakers need 2.4 ghz and therefore this router is not compatible.

 

I bought a Netgear Nighthawk AX2400 (RAX30) router to replace the Sagecom.  Still couldn’t get the sonos app to connect to the wifi.  Spent 1.5 hrs on phone with Spectrum’s technical support and made many changes to router’s settings (unclick AX functionality, select 2.4 ghz, select channel 11 instead of auto, security encryption change, others).  However, nothing changed.

 

I did a factory settings reset on the 2 sonos one speakers and then returned to sonos app and created a new system and location.  It found the speakers and then  sonos was able to log on to the new wifi SSID.  What an ordeal!  I don’t know if a factory settings reset, without changing the router settings, would have worked.  


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2 replies

@MichaelJB

Sonos One speakers use both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz WiFi bands - I run several of them on a Plume WiFi-6 AX mesh network and it’s 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz WiFi bands similarly cannot be separated aswell. So that's likely not going to be the reason, as often such routers use auto-band-steering to put the connected devices on the most appropriate WiFi band. 

I suspect it must have been an issue with one of your router settings, and/or perhaps the new WiFi credentials were not successfully added/stored on each of the speakers after swapping the router,  that (maybe) seems likely the cause of the issue you describe, particularly as post-factory-reset the speakers then went onto setup/work correctly on your network.

I’m not sure exactly which settings were updated in the router. Likely, the WiFi credentials changed and had not updated correctly in the SONOS system. It’s similar to changing socks while running. A good plan with ONE’s is to temporarily wire one or both to the router while you update the ONE’s WiFi credentials.

It is not necessary to Factory Reset for issues such as this, but as you have discovered, the Factory Reset might accidentally, temporarily work around an issue. I recommend that you go back into the router and “reserve” IP addresses for all regular network clients -- especially the SONOS units. This will minimize the risk of a future issue as the SONOS units update their firmware. This particular issue is annoying because you could survive 100 updates in a row with no issues, then on 101 the phantom strikes. The incorrect assumption at this point is that SONOS has failed, but it’s really a preventable router issue.