Arc Ultra Surrounds Disconnect Daily After Extended TV Off Period

Rather than fiddle the router's DHCP renewal timers, I went ahead and reserved addresses for all Sonos and avoided the issue.

Do try one or the other to eliminate the possibility.

Never said they did, I did say they use the 5 gHz Sonosnet. Poorly named and very different.

​@ScottDDev 

Do you by chance have your TV and your Arc plugged into a smart power strip wherein the TV is the command unit that triggers the power strip to send/cut power to other receptacles? If so when you turn the TV off the power is cut to the Arc which in-turn is no longer communicating with surrounds and/or sub bonded to it via the Sonos proprietary 5Ghz channel.

FYI, I use Asus WiFi 7 routers with 32 Sonos units.

​@AjTrek1 I do not. The Arc remains powered on when the TV is off. I haven’t experienced any issues with my Sonos speakers until adding surrounds.

I’m not sure if this is related, but this just happened: The TV was on but idle (Apple TV screensaver), and when I started playback the Sonos Arc Ultra status light turned green and the surrounds began blinking white.

They reconnected after a few seconds, but the left surround is currently out of sync.

For reference, the TV is an LG C9 OLED TV.

OK…do you have different SSID’s set for your 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands and 6Ggz if available? If so you should give the same SSID to all bands. Don’t force Sonos to lock onto a particular node. Let Sonos choose the band and node to connect to.

My ASUS WiFi 7 is an AiMesh with 3 routers connected via a wired backhaul. All bands use the same SSID including the 6Ghz. If using a wireless backhaul one of the 5Ghz (or the 6Ghz) bands would be used to connect the mesh.

It would be very unusual, but not impossible, to be the Arc Ultra or the surrounds. I’d certainly be looking at the router first, and perhaps specifically at the way it handles proxy IP addresses, which is what I believe the surrounds use. 

But, as ​@buzz is wont to say, as soon as you think you know what it is, it turns out to be something different. I’m paraphrasing, mind you, but I certainly agree…especially when talking networking. It always seems straightforward, then you’re taken for a loop…which also turns out to be logical, just not considered before. It is a science, after all, but…

​@ScottDDev 

As you can see all bands share share the same SSID on my network 

At the moment I’m hosting 61 clients of which 32 are Sonos. FYI, I’m viewing my network remotely over 5G cellular 50 miles away.

I have a had a quick scan of this thread, it feels to me like previous issue(s) with Asus and false positive ARP Spoofing, as the satellites share same MAC address as Arc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ASUS+arp+spoof+sonos

Never used Asus, but just a hunch, is the AiProtection enabled?

https://www.asus.com/uk/support/faq/1008719/

Is it possible to exclude/whitelist Sonos devices from the AiProtection, if enabled?

Edit: Another useful link regarding Asus firmware with Guest Network enabled:

When the Sonos Arc Ultra is idle for an extended period (TV off / no audio), I was seeing repeated deauth/auth/assoc log entries for the surrounds, along with the surrounds blinking white.

I enabled multicast routing, and after reconnecting the system, the surrounds stopped blinking after idle and the log activity stopped.

To isolate further, I reset my ASUS RT-AX88U router and ASUS RT-AX58U AiMesh node to factory defaults and did not re-enable any custom settings. I noticed that AiProtection is disabled by default, whereas I had it previously enabled. With everything at default (and without enabling multicast routing again), the surrounds have remained connected during idle and there are no deauth/auth/assoc log entries.

I’ll continue to monitor, but at this point it appears AiProtection may be the root cause. Enabling multicast while AiProtection was enabled also seemed to prevent the disconnect/reconnect loop after idle, although I’m not sure why.

Has anyone else seen AiProtection cause similar behavior with surrounds?

I also want to note that each Sonos speaker maintains a strong, stable connection to the network individually. The issue only occurs with the surround link, which makes me think it may be related to how the Arc Ultra manages its private 5 GHz connection to the surrounds.