Hi @CT_Boston
Welcome to the Sonos Community!
I just wanted to add to excellent advice you’ve already been given that the following statement is a red flag:
Speakers are very close to my own WiFi Router.
No WiFi devices - including your router and Sonos speakers - like to be within 1m of any other WiFi devices. If your speakers are within this distance, the router will be a source of interference for them, and they will be a source for it. Please separate them by at least 1m (3 feet).
I hope this helps.
You’re convinced it isn’t your home router, many of us are confident it is, with either wifi interference impacting the ability to reach your speakers without issue, or possibly a duplicate IP address issue, again on your router. My opinion, based on your post, is the latter, but it could easily be the former, as the symptoms could be the same.
Why are you adamant about not restarting the router? If it were me, I’d want to try anything to fix the issue. In your situation, I’d unplug all my Sonos devices first, then reboot the router, waiting a couple of minutes for it to come back up before plugging back in. If indeed that worked, I would expect it to be a temporary situation, any router that has given out bad IP addresses once could potentially do so again, so I would read the router’s manual to learn how to set up reserved IP addresses, and do that at least for all my Sonos devices. I’ve done it on my router for all my network devices, it is good network management. I leave the first 50 IP addresses open for floating devices, including guests, since I don’t use the guest network function of my router.
Sonos uses the network in a significantly different way than most devices, the Sonos speakers, in order to stream music, need uninterrupted access.
However, you can always submit a system diagnostic within 10 minutes of experiencing this problem, and call Sonos Support to discuss it.
There may be information included in the diagnostic that will help Sonos pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.
When you speak directly to the phone folks, they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your network and Sonos system.
Unplugging to reboot is the way to do it since Sonos removed the internal web-server reboot page.
Folks recommending they not be unplugged are usually responding to a power use topic, not a needs a reboot topic.
Sonos networking is pretty demanding of your network, much more so than many other uses BUT there are still some glitches that may well be Sonos issues. Ones like the IP assignment glitch. Nobody has tagged a reproducible / log-able bug on this from looking at their router logs and the internal Sonos logging is unavailable to users. Not even any official discussion acknowledging the issue or of a pending fix so the manual assignment of IP addresses is the best route available.
It is your router. Please, tell us which one.
I wanted to add some more info. When the app(s) can find the “system” My sonos era 100s are Still on the network! “hey sonos play” and It plays the same source as before. So let me say again 100’s are ON my very functional network. I maintain my own router as well and can See the devices. The 100’s never left.. I just can’t remote control them with the iOS app on my fully patched iphone. Also note both the 2 100’s and my iponde are the same network. The same subnet.
Thanks for your quick response. No wifi interference in my 5g or 2.4g network basement office. Speakers are very close to my own WiFi Router. I do know about reserved static IP addresses. That is worth a try. !
As to not wanting to reboot the router -other people on this small network.
Interesting that there is NO on/off button on these very fine speakers. Many suggestions note to unplug the device. Seems an on/off switch would have helped. :)
I should have paid more attention to
https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/sonos-led-lights?utm_source=doc-care&utm_medium=led&utm_campaign=en-us-doc-care-led
Thanks again.