Securing your Sonos Wi-Fi network from your customers.

Many small businesses like restaurants, hotels and bars rely on a Sonos Systems for multi room audio they also want to offer free Wi-Fi to their customers.

However a problem arises when you connect your sonos system to your public Wi-Fi network. Anyone that has the sonos app can take control of the music because there is no facility for passwords in the sonos controller.

Now this can be fixed by having a separate Wi-Fi network for staff and customers but a few more steps must be taken.

You could put the staff network on a separate VLAN but this requires a VLAN enabled router and some tricky configurations that most small businesses are not going to be able to accomplish.

You could put the customers on a guest network this will isolate them from the staff network and the sonos system. You will need a guest network option built into your Wi-Fi access point or controller. This can break some application and sometimes requires a captive portal or splash page that doesn’t play well with mobile devices.

Or the best option for most is to enable L2 Isolation on the customer Wi-Fi network and then connect the sonos to the staff network. This stops Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi client traffic so the guests will not be able to access the sonos controller. As a added bonus they will not be able to see any other Wi-Fi connected devices like printers or shared folders on PC’s. Now this trick will only work if the sonos devices are connected to Wi-Fi if they are hardwired to ethernet and using sonosnet you will need to use one of the other methods above.

Wi-Fi connected Sonos devices need a strong Wi-Fi signal to work well so first you want to make sure you have enough Wi-Fi Access Points and they are located as close as possible to your sonos units.

Click here to see some of our Wi-Fi Access Points that support L2 isolation.

Here is the best Sonos device for businesses the connect you can connect it to your own amp and speakers use multiple connects for different areas.

The Sonos one is great for smaller areas like a coffee house you can pair 2 in stereo mode no amps or extra speakers required.

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