grouping 5hz and 2.4 hz

Unfortunately all these ISP-supplied boxes/systems are built down to a price. I run nothing Sonos-wise off my BT Smart Hub 1.

I’ve read a bit on the BT community and someone has suggested using a second BT router (I actually have 2 previous routers; they never asked for them back), turn off the 5hz band on that and then connect Sonos to that network.

They suggested ensuring it used a different IP address to avoid clashes with the existing network.

Any thoughts on that proposed solution and how to I change the IP address of a router?

As a second question - I often check the matrix map, and I notice that if changes throughout the day.  Take this morning for example, first thing everything was green and now I have a red flag for the left surround speaker of the playbar - Why would this happen when nothing else is changing in that room?

Don’t if it is related, but I went on my router settings and tried to rename the player and got this message

???

It depends what you envisage.

You could stack (cascade) a second router behind the main one, so long as you move everything onto the second router’s subnet. This is known as ‘double-NAT’. To do that you’d need to change the second router’s subnet prefix to something different, such as 192.168.2.x. 

If you just want to use the second router as an access point you’d need to disable its DHCP server, change its internal address to, say, 192.168.1.253 (i.e. something other than .254), and wire it via a LAN port. This may help: https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-to-turn-an-old-wi-fi-router-into-an-access-point/

The Playbar’s satellites idle on 2.4GHz. That’s just a bit of ambient noise. You can ignore it, since they move to 5GHz when operational.

Don’t if it is related, but I went on my router settings and tried to rename the player and got this message

???

It looks like you tried to reserve a fixed IP that was already in use.

On the first point - the intent was to hard wire the old router to my existing router to effectively create a second SSID.

On the second, thanks - That explains it.

To the IP issue - Nope, just tried to rename it - I used the IP address from the Sonos sytem to identify the player and change it from SONOS ZP to something more meaningful

I managed to rename others

As you might have gathered, I’ve not tried to do anything fancy with anything as it is way outside my sphere of knowledge!

You can totally ignore the names. They’re not used for anything. 

If it’s a case of remembering which IP goes with which MAC, and which device they represent, I just keep a spreadsheet.

Yep, but useful for troubleshooting like when one stereo pair connects to one wifi disk and the other one connects to a different one = rubbish connectivity!

Update:

On Friday evening, I swapped to a wired set up.

Generally the system is better and more responsive, both from the phone and desktop apps.  The two problem rooms (with stereo pairs) have been Ok, even when grouped together.

I have still got a problem when grouping the soundbar (and surround speakers) with other rooms.  On investigation, I have noticed that the 2 surround speakers are connected to the hub.  All other speakers are not showing up (as expected given they are now using the Sonosnet)

Is it normal? and/or due to the way the soundbar and surround speakers connect to each other?