Hi, Debbie Downer here — The answer is simple: switch back. Put the Plumes back into their cute hexagonal 6-pack and unearth whatever router and/or wireless access points you were using before. CenturyLink doesn’t require you to use their equipment, and the base (Sun!) Plume still uses an Ethernet cable to connect to the perfectly ordinary DSL modem. [Edit: Plume may have pushed OpenSync into the DSL modem nowadays, but that only means you must get help from CenturyLink to bypass or turn it off.]
Maybe the Plume app has gotten better, but it didn’t allow configuration of much really, so prioritizing Airplay is not an option. The fact that you can’t even select 2.4GHz is a warning sign, though there *is* a reason for that, namely they can’t frequency-hop and -multiplex to do a high-speed backhaul without the multiple channels available in 5GHz.
If you want to keep trying, then if you haven’t installed all 6 pods, do so. Line of sight thru doorways will help the 5GHz signal that doesn’t go through walls well. Yes, multi-unit hops slow everything down, but down to *tens* of megabits in the worst case, which is plenty for music distribution. Better to improve coverage at the expense of throughput.
But ultimately Debbie sez “frequency-hopping confuses poorly written networking stacks.” If the Plumes keep forcing the B&O equipment to jump because now they prefer some channel to optimize mesh transmission, you’re just asking for trouble. And Plumes *do* — that’s the point of (so-called) “AI” optimizing. Worse, you don’t know how often they are monitoring the data and saying, “yikes, we must reconfigure for optimal transmission of this new nonstop (audio) stream,” i.e. at the worst possible time. (“Nonstop” depends upon AirPlay(1) vs. Airplay2, but ignore the details.)
Let us hope that someone who is currently using CenturyLink and Plumes jumps in here and saves the day, making Debbie’s advice irrelevant!
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