System unreliable after disabling SonosNet so I went back
tl;dr - Switching from SonosNet to Wi-Fi caused my only speaker on Wi-Fi to keep dropping off the network. Back to SonosNet and everything is rock-solid again.
I recently decided to give Wi-Fi another chance for my Sonos system since installing a Boost and moving to SonosNet a few years ago. The Boost originally solved all of my problems with speakers randomly dropping off my network, specifically those that were not wired directly over Ethernet.
I went through the wizard to disable SonosNet, no errors reported. For a few hours, there were no problems with my system. However, at some point, my only Wi-Fi speaker (a Sonos One SL) became unavailable. I could see from the diagnostic logs on my Ruckus Unleashed system that that speaker was unable to authenticate with my Wi-Fi network. Weird, since it had been running problem-free for at least several hours until it dropped from my network. I power-cycled the system and it came back, only to drop off again about a day later. At that point, even power cycling didn’t bring it back—I had to factory reset the speaker and re-join it to my network. It worked fine for about a day and then dropped off my network again.
Here is my complete Sonos setup:
- Sonos Arc Ultra (wired)
- Sonos One + One SL (paired as surrounds to the Arc Ultra, not wired)
- Sonos Beam (wired)
- Sonos Play:1 x 2 (paired as surrounds to the Beam, not wired)
- Sonos One (wired) + Sonos One SL (not wired - this is the one that keeps dropping off in Wi-Fi mode), paired as a stereo pair
- Sonos Amp (wired)
- Sonos One (wired)
- Sonos Boost (wired)
All are running S2, all have static DHCP IP address reservations.
My Wi-Fi network only has 5 GHz enabled and uses WPA3 authentication. I don’t have the Sonos system on a separate VLAN or anything, it is a flat network topology.
We are an Apple household, no Android, no Windows devices, a couple of Linux boxes; all of my setup is being done on an iPhone.
From Sonos’s documentation, my setup should support 5 GHz Wi-Fi and WPA3 authentication without a problem but something is preventing my One SL from staying on Wi-Fi. Thankfully I’m in a position where a) I’m able to wire most of my speakers and b) I still have SonosNet available to me.
Are the Ones and One SLs just bad with modern Wi-Fi? I know my Play:1s probably wouldn’t work with my current setup if they weren’t paired to the Beam as surrounds.
