Sky Q and Sonos problems

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.

Also covered here by Mad+Sweeny - I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m hopeful

https://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky-Q/SkyQ-and-Sonos-interfering-with-each-other/m-p/3687726/emcs_t/S2h8ZW1haWx8bWVudGlvbl9zdWJzY3JpcHRpb258S09HRUJaQkpWVzJSfDM2ODc3MjZ8QVRfTUVOVElPTlN8aEs

I have installed gigabit switch to replace my 10/100 device as proposed by Mad+sweeney on Sky community post and echoed here by Johnn_1 and everything is now working.

I hope this works for everyone

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 problem is really Sky Q not Sonos.  As I understand it Sonos sends 1500 (+14).  Then instead of just passing this through SkyQ adds another 14bits and then some of this gets stripped off by 10/100 switches that confirm directly to standards (I believe that some 10/100 switches will actually pass 1528).

If you want a forensic explanation you should follow my link to Mad+Sweeney’s posts on the Sky forum.

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.

What insanity is this? SkyQ tunnels all your data in order to provide a bizarre version of QoS to their own devices?? Wow.

UK telcos really do want to inflict pain on their users, with this Sky craziness and BT testing their router updates in someone’s basement for 10 minutes before releasing them.

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 moved from a single BT router with extenders to Sky Q. Never had any problems until the switch. Then it was a nightmare both to get all Sonos products connected (Beams, Amps, Subs, Playbars etc). Since then I get similar issues to described with products dropping in and out based on where I am in the house, which Sonos products are connected to which  SkyQ routers at the time (there is one Sky main box and 2 mini boxes) and which router my I-phone Sonos App is connected to. As other have mentioned it is an ongoing issue based on how Sky Q mesh wifi network operates vs Sonos.

I think I may have found a solution which while not foolproof seems to have worked on my system. I basically bought a Sonos Boost. Initially when I connected it to the main Sky router via Ethernet I had no luck - would not connect.

However I then reset it and instead connected it via Ethernet to one of the wirelessly connected Sky mini boxes in another part of the house and it magically worked. Since then all Sonos products are reliably connected via the Boost.  I’m hoping that now all product are connected using the Sonos mesh network and not Sky wifi it will remain stable. Fingers crossed: