Connection Issue

As ​@Gaham says, it’s worth reserving addresses, if nothing else to rule out this as a possible cause.  It is surprising how many times this resolves issues similar to yours but you’d think with modern routers this wouldn’t be the case.

No they wouldn’t show in the router as if it was aware of a possible duplicate, it wouldn’t create one.

My router only shows Sonos Rooms as attached so that means that 6 speakers in my setup have IP addresses but are not showing as attached.

Taking out “personal” details this is what my setup reconciles to.

Interesting, mine looks something like this, with each speaker as an IP Address. 

​@Canaryyella based on what I can observe in my setup I suspect that the way to reserve IP addresses for all of the speakers in a Sonos room will be to turn them on one by one so that they show as attached and available to reserve.

Every Sonos product will be renewing its “lease” of the address on a regular basis so even the ones that you can’t see in the router table need to be maintained so should be fixed like the others.

​@Canaryyella do you have any rooms aka zones or is it all single speakers?

I have one “Games room” zone, the rest are single speakers

I spent many, many hours looking into DHCP issues as I couldn’t accept the “duplicate” answer either. All to no result from my router’s (pfSense) extensive logging and a bit of network sniffing.

Reserved the addresses anyway.

Sonos system went from unusable to stable.

Just got several new Sonos, assigned them addresses using the MAC addresses on the shipping box. All went in with no issues, versus last time I tried without assigning addresses first that added hours and frustration to simply adding two surrounds.

Add them, worry about why it works later, if at all.

I spent 2.5 hours with Sonos support. They finally gave up to no avail. 
 

I have reserved the IPs. No improvement. 
 

I have turned off the sky wifi and tried to just use the ASUS wifi. Then sky stopped working on the mini boxes and eventually the main box. 
 

I have since split the sky channel to 2ghz and 5ghz and connected the Sonos to the sky 2ghz network and left the ASUS network running. Still isn’t stable. 
 

The Sonos engineer thinks it’s something to do with the sky q boxes and their mesh network. But I bought netspot and seems very little over lap with channels. I am unsure how to find if any network device is ‘noisy’. Doesn’t seem to be an issue with the 5ghz band width. 
 

I’m at the point of giving up. I am a completer finisher and once I start I struggle to stop. But I feel I have now spent at least 10 hours on this and if I didn’t have £3k worth of speakers I would have replaced with a bunch of Apple stuff that just works from box. 
 

Apologies if sometimes I used wrong terminology. I have been honest that I know a little but clearly not enough to solve. 

Based on the evidence that is emerging I think that the statement that is frequently made about the issue being our local networks is actually an incomplete statement and the truth is that the issue is the way that Sonos implement their “sub network” within our local network. 

When looked at in this way the duplicate IP address theory seems more plausible but that does leave the important question:

Why does this impact some users but not others? 

In the analysis that I did earlier today, and published here, 6 IP addresses being used by Sonos were not in the active IP addresses logged by the router so could be considered “invisible” or “unused” and therefore available for allocation by the router.

If the router is reusing IP addresses, it believes are not in use, that Sonos thinks are still allocated to a speaker that would obviously create the duplicate scenario that would cause an issue when Sonos used that address to connect to the speaker.

As a theory it makes some sense but at this stage it is just a theory. 

Using fixed IP addresses would of course prevent this scenario.