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Hello All,
I was fighting an issue that ultimately turned out to be my main router having an issue, but I did discover that I could not connect my Sonos devices to my 5GHz network because it had an underscore in the name. Once I took the underscore out, it connected fine, but I hate the way the network name looks now lol. Is there a list of acceptable special characters in an wifi SSID for Sonos devices?
Best answer by Marco_5
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Couldn’t find a link to the actual specification but turned this up:
These SSIDs can be zero to 32 octets (32 bytes) long,[11] and are, for convenience, usually in a natural language, such as English. The 802.11 standards prior to the 2012 edition did not define any particular encoding or representation for SSIDs, which were expected to be treated and handled as an arbitrary sequence of 0–32 octets that are not limited to printable characters. IEEE Std 802.11-2012 defines a flag to express that the SSID is UTF-8-encoded and could contain any Unicode text.[12] Wireless network stacks must still be prepared to handle arbitrary values in the SSID field.
Found several discussions of different devices that balked at some characters that seem to be allowed by the standard so it is not just Sonos.
+2
Couldn’t find a link to the actual specification but turned this up:
These SSIDs can be zero to 32 octets (32 bytes) long,[11] and are, for convenience, usually in a natural language, such as English. The 802.11 standards prior to the 2012 edition did not define any particular encoding or representation for SSIDs, which were expected to be treated and handled as an arbitrary sequence of 0–32 octets that are not limited to printable characters. IEEE Std 802.11-2012 defines a flag to express that the SSID is UTF-8-encoded and could contain any Unicode text.[12] Wireless network stacks must still be prepared to handle arbitrary values in the SSID field.
Found several discussions of different devices that balked at some characters that seem to be allowed by the standard so it is not just Sonos.
Yeah, it’s annoying that Sonos is the only product in my environment that is having issues with the underscore. I did play around a bit this weekend and it looks like a dash may be ok. I didn’t try a space because my script writing background hates spaces, but I think I saw where people had success with that. Sonos definitely had issues with underscores and periods. I ended up scrapping the whole idea anyhow because my Sonos system completely freaked out when I tried to switch from 2.4GHz to 5GHz, most likely because of the Arc and the attached surround speakers (One SLs and a Sub), which I understand to use 5GHz for their grouping. I’m going to leave it on the 2.4GHz network (which has no special characters in the name) and figure out why my 2.4GHz network is performing so poorly.
Sonos definitely had issues with underscores and periods. I ended up scrapping the whole idea anyhow because my Sonos system completely freaked out when I tried to switch from 2.4GHz to 5GHz, most likely because of the Arc and the attached surround speakers (One SLs and a Sub), which I understand to use 5GHz for their grouping. I’m going to leave it on the 2.4GHz network (which has no special characters in the name) and figure out why my 2.4GHz network is performing so poorly.
The Arc can only connect to 2.4GHz as it uses its 5GHz radio to communicate with Sub/Surrounds
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Use your system until you get one of the problems that are bugging you to happen, then within a few minutes submit a diagnostic and Contact Sonos support with the diagnostic number. They can see a lot of internal data we can’t so it is a good starting point.
The FAQ here has a lot of suggestions too: https://www.sonos.com/support
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