Summary/TLDR
- Overall, it was death by a thousand cuts – there were many things wrong, from radio placement, to poor settings, poor products (glitchy routers), to older products, to needing to understand how newer products worked as I didn’t know Sonos had their own wifi network even in addition to your main one.
- Newer hardware was in order. If I had started with that, whether consumer or enterprise grade, it would have gotten much better much faster. It’s obvious the firmware for the Asus routers was just unusable as a wifi repeater (and both routers were on the very latest firmware revisions). This is not to dog Asus either; I’m sure newer products work better, and Asus does make some great stuff, but all brands/companies have their lemons too.
- Radio placement is crucial, get it off the ground and as high up as you can, the higher the better.
- Powerline ethernet adapters were “OK”, but the RF noise was a bummer. I also didn’t get super speed out of them, partially due to my garage having its own electrical panel.
- Simplify as much as you can, the least amount of SSIDs, repeaters, and hops makes things a lot more reliable, and keeping all Sonos devices on one SSID really helped there. I suspect the speakers were creating a loop or conflicting with their own internal network. I may still try removing one of the Eero repeaters to see if its even needed.
- As with all things radio, experimentation is in order. I could have fixed all this sooner, but I came out ahead with some valuable experience and knowledge, knowing now what the weak points were and the fickleness of radio. As an amateur radio operator, we’re very aware there truly is no single right answer when it comes to radio waves.
- Part of troubleshooting was isolating parts of the network or just shutting off devices, I do recommend this and slowly re-add devices and systems, to determine if something is affecting the big picture.
Anyway, sorry for the super-long post, but I hope this helps someone in sorting out their home network, in less time and frustration than this process. Again I love experimenting, and the frustration was mainly in that things generally worked; it wasn’t until recently that all the problems starting having a severe impact, and sometimes that’s just what it takes to motivate you to really dig in.