Sonos Simplifies Its Wireless Speaker System
Sonos wants to make it even easier for consumers to set up their first internet-connected speaker, which is why the company won’t require its users to set up dedicated wireless networks anymore. Instead, Sonos speakers now directly connect to your home WiFi network. And to make that network go even further, Sonos is also introducing its very first WiFi range extender, dubbed the Boost.
That’s a departure from the way Sonos has traditionally streamed music across the home: Ever since it launched its first product in 2005, Sonos required users to bypass their home WiFi networks, either by directly plugging into a router with an Ethernet cable or with the company’s own Bridge device, which operates its own dedicated wireless network optimized for audio streaming.
“We were paranoid about the quality of the networking,” remembered Andy Schulert, Sonos VP of quality. “In hindsight, that was the right decision in 2003,” when the company started working on its first products, and WiFi routers still were riddled with problems, he said.
However, WiFi has evolved over the past decade, and most consumers nowadays have routers that easily cover their entire homes. Plus, Sonos isn’t the only application requiring connectivity and quality of service for media streaming anymore. People use Netflix and YouTube all over their houses, and frequently upgrade their routers when their home networks aren’t capable of accessing these services, optimizing network performance for Sonos speakers in the process.
Sonos has been working on switching from its proprietary network to open WiFi for about two years, and during recent months tested Bridge-less setups with thousands of customers and close to 400 different home WiFi routers. Schulert said he feels confident that the company’s speakers will work on home WiFi in most cases, in part because Sonos speakers still use their own mesh technology in multiroom setups. If you have one Sonos speaker in your living room and one in your kitchen, then only one of them will access Spotify through your router, and then relay the signal to the other one, provided that both are within reach.
Of course, sometimes that’s simply not the case. That’s why Sonos will launch a kind of range extender called the Boost for $99 later this year. And Sonos will continue to sell the $49 Bridge as well, as the device is still required for 3.1 or 5.1 home theater setups.
For Sonos, switching to regular WiFi is all about making things easier for new customers. The Bridge requirement “was a little bit of a speed bump,” said Schulert, even though retailers frequently bundled the device as part of special promotions. Now consumers will be able to buy a speaker and get started without a Bridge or an Ethernet cable, which should help the company during the coming holiday season.
What does all of this mean for existing customers? Sonos actually wants them to keep their Bridges plugged in. “Don’t change a thing,” Schulert told me. He added that it’s possible to switch existing systems to a Bridge-less setup, but that the company would rather people stick with what’s already working. That’s understandable from a customer support perspective; after all, changing a working setup can possibly introduce new points of failure — but as a Sonos user myself, I have to say that I can’t wait to get rid of my Bridge.
My colleague Stacey Higginbotham interviewed Sonos’ VP of product management about Bridge-less playback and his company’s plans for plugging into the Internet of Things for her weekly IoT podcast in May — have a listen:
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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