Disable WiFi on Sonos

In our new home, I wanted to wire up as many devices as possible. Last night, I also connected the Sonos speakers using shielded FTP (why sFTP is a completely different story and may come another time), which allowed me to disable WiFi on the Sonos player.

Disabling WiFi on your Sonos  

For the long answer, you can visit the site of bsteiner.info . In short, it comes down to the following:

• Go to “about my sonos system”
• Look for the IP address in the About screen.
• Go to your web browser and enter http://<ip_address_you_found>:1400/status/ifconfig
• http://<ip_address_you_found>:1400/wifictrl?wifi=off (temporary. (After rebooting, it is back to normal)
• http://<ip_address_you_found>:1400/wifictrl?wifi=persist-off (Stays disabled during a reboot)

All Sonos devices try to set up a wireless mesh network via peer-to-peer when turned on, also known as SonosNet. This can be useful, but in some situations, you might want to turn it off:

• You only have one Sonos device connected to your router via cable. You then don’t necessarily need SonosNet, so why not turn it off to save a bit of power and reduce some electromagnetic radiation.
• You live in an area where there are already so many WiFi networks that there is hardly any room left, resulting in interference and disruptions.
• SonosNet relies on the spanning tree protocol (aka STP) to function properly. If your other network components do not support this, your network could become overloaded with broadcast storms and regular crashes. You could, of course, upgrade your network, but you can also simply disable this source of problems. Just as easy and way cheaper.
• You are security conscious and afraid of WiFi-Jacking. Why would you leave a backdoor open in your network that is not really well secured?

You can thus disable or enable the wireless interface on each Sonos device in three simple steps.

Step 1: Find the IP address of your Sonos device  

In the Sonos controller app, click on the “about my sonos system” menu. You’ll then get something that looks like the following image.

PLAY:5: Bedroom
Serial Number: 00-0E-58-2D-B0-C3:3 
Version: 4.2 (build 24071060) 
Hardware Version: 1.16.4.1-1 
IP Address: 192.168.1.27 
OTP: 1.1.1(1-16-4-zp5s-0.5)

In the example above, the IP address is 192.168.1.27. I will use this for the rest of this article.

If you’re more technically capable, you can also find the IP address from your DHCP server. Sonos registers itself with a SonosZP client ID.

Step 2: Checking the WiFi link.  

Sonos has a little-known status page via port 1400 on their players that you can access from a standard web browser at:

http://<sonos_ip>:1400/status/ifconfig

The network interfaces are labeled ‘eth0’ and ‘eth1’, corresponding to the 2 possible network ports. The ’lo’ (loopback) and ‘br0’ (bridge) interfaces are virtual devices used internally by the Linux kernel. The line we’re most interested in is ‘ath0’, which stands for Atheros device 0. Atheros is the maker of the embedded WiFi chip.

Step 3: Disabling the WiFi link  

To turn off the WiFi link, use the following HTTP command:

http://<sonos_ip>:1400/wifictrl?wifi=off

You should get something similar to the following line:

wifictrl request succeeded HTTP 200 OK

To check if WiFi has indeed been disabled, you can go back to the status page. The ‘ath0’ should no longer appear in the overview. The setting is not saved during the restarting of your Sonos, so if the Sonos player no longer works, you can easily restart it by briefly removing power.

If you want to permanently disable the WiFi link, use the following command:

http://<sonos_ip>:1400/wifictrl?wifi=persist-off

The change will now remain saved, even after a software update. If you ever want to use the Sonos device wirelessly again, you can, of course, turn it back on with the command:

http://<sonos_ip>:1400/wifictrl?wifi=on

Impact on power consumption  

I measured the power consumption of various players with a power meter, which is accurate to +/- 0.5 watt. Turning off the WiFi link reduces consumption by about 2 Watts. The results of the different players at idle/no music playing: