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Forum Discussion
SONOS Compatability with Orbi
Is Orbi compatable with the SONOS mesh network? I have an extensive SONOS system throughout my house (7000 sq ft). It works flawlessly and I have wondered why a mesh network for a LAN application ha...
Ah, yep. I had this issue when I got my orbi. Current manufactured shipping units are not shipping with the current firmware. Worse than that, auto updates don't work on satellites with earlier firmwares (that's something that is fixed in a later firmware. So this process below should only need to be done once.).
To fix this you have to download the latest satellite firmware from netgear manually. should be here: https://www.netgear.com/support/product/RBK50?cid=wmt_netgear_organic#RBS50%20(Orbi%20Satellite)%20Firmware%20Version%201.4.0.16 . You need to extract the image file out of the zip you download.
Then you need to connect to the satellite ip directly. You can find that on your orbi router home page under "attached devices". It should be under connected satellites.
Go to that ip directly in the browser and it will ask for orbi username and password. Same as the main one.
You can then use "firmware update" from the menu and select the image file extracted from the zip. This took several tries on one of my satellites complaining the process timed out.
Once you do all of this and it (finally) succeeds, it should be up to date and working. I would not be surprised if Sonos starts working after that. (I would also unplug power, leave out for 10 seconds and plug everything back in on All Orbi and Sonos units.
On the sonos front, when I swapped to the new wifi network, I had to re-add those speakers by plugging them in via ethernet and re-add them / run the wifi setup wizard again. It was really frustrating. Then I had to unplug them, move them back to their original location and they joined the orbi network fine after that.
I have still not had any issues with Sonos all day with just wifi.
Wow, that advice was super helpful, thank you. I had no idea! This is the price us early adopters always end up paying...
Indeed. I will say that eero does not suffer from this "it's not updated" nonsense precisely because their cloud controls the update rollout.
But performance of a working Orbi beats a working eero in nearly all cases (haven't had my own eero, but all reports put orbi well ahead here). The cost of power/performance is usually ease of use/maintenance. Eero is stupid simple. And when it doesn't work, not much you can do about it.--Derrek