Sonos

Something very wrong there - a same room setup should work perfectly with no problem. It could be your router is the root of the problem, or somehow your system has got confused and set itself up as two different Sonos-net networks (these were both problems with mine) or something else like interference but you would need to be able to access and understand a diagnostic report to find out. I suggest you contact the Sonos help desk as per my earlier post.

 

Home hub 4? There is your problem. Sonos help desk explained the shortcomings of Home Hubs as soon as I told them I had one. They tend to forget Sonos units IP addresses or something like that - they have a lot of problems with them apparently. The first thing they did for me is configure my Home Hub as just a modem and set up my Apple AirPort Extreme as my router instead. Result? Immediate improvement to my Sonos and my wifi generally. STRONGLY suggest you contact Sonos help desk!

 

Sad to say home hub 5 is no different in my experience. Same issues between the frequencies. Knocking out one of the frequencies, for our home hub at least, hasn't helped with the Sonos (or some of the other devices). One of the devices in the house we believe causes the Sonos, one PC and one iPad to lose the wifi connection for reasons neither BT nor Sonos technical understand. The iPad and PC that repeatedly lose connection have identical specifications and set up to at least one other device in the house.

Bloody thing drives me up the wall. I've to call Sonos again at some point but I'm up to my eyeballs at the moment.

 

Sonos made a change recently to the way their products link together which may help some of you with connection issues over long distance. The way it used to work was that at least one device needed to be connected to the router via ethernet cable. If you didn't plan on placing a speaker near the router then you connected the bridge to the router and then your speakers would in turn connect to the bridge. The Sonos devices created their own separate network which you have no control over or access to. It's all managed seamlessly by the Sonos devices. I initially used this setup and found that I could move the speaker a fair distance from the bridge with no problems. However, I don't know the specs for the Sonos network, no idea what frequency it's running on. It doesn't show up on the wifi signal scans that I run so it's somewhere other than the 2.4Ghz band. I'm guessing that those users struggling with distance issues are having problems because of the distance between the Sonos components causing a failure on connectivity between them.

The change that Sonos recently made was to give users a choice of whether they use the Sonos sub-network solution with at least one component connected wired to the router, or whether they opt to run the devices totally over the home wifi network running on 2.4GHz. This eliminates the need for a bridge if your speakers and router are not close. I have a speaker sat near the router so for me it's not an issue, I wire in directly. For those users with problems it may be worth changing to using the home wifi network and making sure that you have a decent router - one of the new AC spec ones but not the BT Homehub 5 as it performs poorly over distance. Some of the newer AC routers give a massive improvement in range over the older 802.11n routers, even if you are not using AC spec deivces. There's technology built in to the AC routers which boosts signal strength to older devices and it really works.

Something I did was to give fixed IP addresses to the key components on my network such as the NAS drive and Sonos players to avoid IP conflicts.

I had quite a few issues with my BT Homehub 4 too when I configured it as a modem and tried to use it in bridge mode to connect with my high performance router. I had DNS issues which were only resolved when I installed a D-Link modem and junked the HH.