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Contributor I
Apr 29, 2019 1:39 AM UTC

Unusual sonos internet activity

What is the purpose and why is my sonos speakers & bridge sending data to locations in Virginia?
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    6 replies

    IanSCAuthor
    Contributor I
    Apr 29, 2019 1:51 AM UTC
    I was doing some investigating on my monthly data usage and installed Princeton IoT Inspector to monitor what devises were sending out / consuming data.
    One Sunday i noticed that all my 5 sonos speakers were sending multiple MBs of activity when nobody was home, no alarms were set and no speakers were playing. The really cool thing about the Princeton IoT Inspector app (MAC only for now...sorry) is that it told me where the data was being sent to, and how much data was being sent.
    My sonos speakers were sending data to two locations just outside of Washington DC, in the state of Virginia.
    I thought Sonos was a California company.
    I live in Canada.

    anybody know why?
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    Airgetlam
    Apr 29, 2019 2:00 AM UTC
    There are a lot of datacenters outside of DC, near Dulles Airport. It's possible that Sonos is renting space there for their systems?

    Sonos has locations in California, Massachussets, and overseas. In my business (games) the servers are almost never where the company is. We would either rent data center space directly, or more likely these days, use Amazon Web Services.
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    Bruce
    Stanley_4
    Grand Maestro
    Apr 29, 2019 8:33 AM UTC
    Locations mean almost nothing on the Internet, what were the domain names and IP addresses?
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    buzz
    Grand Maestro
    Apr 29, 2019 2:35 PM UTC
    I assume that you were using an online music service during your monitoring session. As others have mentioned, online companies can use distributed servers, worldwide. This is done in an effort to speed delivery, balance loads, and provide redundancy in case of equipment or connectivity failures.
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    Lyricist I
    Apr 30, 2019 2:45 PM UTC
    SONOS uses AWS for their cloud infrastructure. The biggest (and most popular) AWS region is the region out of Virginia. What's the IP address? I'm betting it will be an address belonging to AWS.
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    controlav
    Lead Maestro
    May 1, 2019 1:22 AM UTC
    Sonos also use Azure for some of their work, and Azure is in more geos than AWS. This whole debate would be more useful if we could see the domain names/addresses that the OP is concerned about.
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    Author of the leading independent Sonos apps for Android, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Xbox.