Google Home Speaker Groups / Stereo Pairs within a VLAN

Routers
1

Hello everyone,

I recently moved into the Alta Labs ecosystem with a Route10 and the access points. I’ve been loving it so far and my experience has been positive! I have an issue which I suspect is related to VLAN configuration and I was wondering if anyone else has experienced the same issue.

The problem involves Google Home Speaker Groups / Stereo Pairs. When casting media to these devices, one of the speakers will mention something about not being able to connect to the other pair and media will only play on one of the speakers. Originally, I didn’t see these speaker groups as an option when casting, but I’ve enabled IGMP Snooping and that has helped in at least seeing these groups and being able to connect to it via my phone.

All my IOT devices are in their own VLAN with mDNS and IGMP Snooping enabled. One related thread here: https://community.ui.com/questions/UDMUDMP-IoT-VLAN-Speaker-Group-fix-with-mDNS-and-Google-Nest-Speakers-Chromecasts/37d6239f-303e-4f9f-8727-626acf07d33c, was somewhat helpful and I assume there is some firewall rules that I need to configure. But, I haven’t had luck with following that particular post and porting over the rules to Alta Labs.

I was wondering if there was anyone else here who may have a similar setup and has this working? If so, would anyone be able to share the configuration they used to get this working?

Thanks in advance!

2

Just to put a bow on this, the root of the issue was that the speakers were on a WiFi network type of IoT. This will restrict intra-LAN communication, particularly sourced from the IoT clients.

It is common, when grouping smart speakers, one speaker is selected as the coordinator of the group and, in doing so, will need to communicate to the other speakers to perform the coordination. The IoT network type blocks this communication as a security measure given the questionable security of some IoT devices.

The fix was simple enough, put the smart speakers on a different network type. In this case, Standard/Small was used and that resolved the issue.

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