Bose tech support says it has identified the WiFi pairing problem

[gvenditto]

I have participated in several threads on this board, complaining about the problems I have been experiencing with my SoundTouch 10 since an October update of the SoundTouch app. In my case, the speakers will play only for a day or two. I have spent many hours re-configuring the speakers and tried all sorts of suggestions. Today, a month after I first contacted Bose customer support by email, I received this reply. They are at least ackowledging there is a problem, they know what it is and they will produce an update that addresses it....

The following is copied from the email I received this morning ...

Thanks for getting back to us. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Thank you in advance for your patience. We hope to have the problem fixed as soon as possible.

Recently, there has been an increase in reports from SoundTouch customers concerning speaker discovery in the SoundTouch app and speaker network connectivity issues. We believe we have identified this bug and hope to have a fix in place soon.

The bug is caused when a SoundTouch speaker requests an IP address renewal from the router’s DHCP server. The speaker, for whatever reason, is rejecting the renewal requests. Therefore, the speaker cannot be found by our application.

There are several ways to resolve this temporarily until a software update can be released.

- DHCP lease time extension:
Many routers have a default DHCP lease time of 24 hours. Extending the lease time to the maximum number of hours should reduce how often this issue occurs. However, this will not completely resolve the problem.

- DHCP reservations
A more permanent solution is to reserve an IP address for the SoundTouch speaker(s) in use. This means the DHCP server will reserve an IP address for a device’s MAC address. This is done in the router itself.

Both options above are dependent on the router’s capabilities. We have found that some routers do not provide either of the previously-suggested options. Thus, some customers will be unable to improve this issue until a software fix is released. These customers can resolve this issue temporarily by removing power and resetting the speaker. This should reinitialize the DCHP request process and obtain a new IP address.

We are actively investigating this issue and hope to have a resolution soon. We will update the Bose community support board with any further information regarding timing of an upcoming fix.

Hope for your kind understanding and patience. Take care and Happy New Year!

[Havvkeye]

Seems like a really long time to wait for a reply but it seems consistent with the answers given on here in the forums.  Increase lease time on DHCP or assign a static IP.

[gvenditto]

Yes, a long time and many other suggestions were tried in the meantime. I've put in many hours trying to get it to work -- including 45 minutes on the phone with Bose tech support in December which ended with the support person saying they didn't know why the speakers would not stay paired. 

If my router software allowed me to change the speaker's to static or to extend their DHCP lease, I'd do it myself, but now I guess I need to wait for the software update.

[gvenditto]

Another week gone by and no updates from Bose. Another week that my purchase of this product has been wasted.

What will it take to get Bose to fix this problem that they caused in a product they sell?

I hope others who have this problem are asking for answers from customer support.

[mattius]

This has been the standard response from Bose for years, it is nothing new. They are always blaming customers networks and not their devices.

I did a lot of work in the past looking at how the soundtouch speakers and app communicate, i passed this information on to Bose however nothing was ever done with it.

The speakers anounce themselves to the app and each other using SSDP (Simple Network Discovery Protocol) this is used by many "connected devices" i.e. your router etc to anounce themselves to anyone listening.

Think of it as a group message to every device on your network, basically the app sends out a broadcast message (to every device on your network) saying "who's out there", if the device is listening for this message it will respond giving certain details (in Bose's case it responds with the MAC address of your speaker amongst others which Bose use to uniquely identify it).

The problem is that after a while, the speakers stop responding to these requests, they are still connected to the network (you can still ping them), but they do not announce themselves on the SSDP request.

I was going to do a few long term diagnostic tests to try and work out what was going on, but Bose aren't interested in anything i tell them so whats the point.

[MajikTim]

Has anyone heard anything more? I can still only use one of the speakers. Even more strangely I can control the one that works through the faulty one as when I turn it on and select a station it turns the other one on and plays it on that. Nothing on that one!

[Joel_D]

Hello MajikTim,

Thank you for posting. What systems do you currently own? Were you able to perform the latest update to both systems? There is an article located HERE that might help. Also what is age, make and model of your router?

Let me know the results.

Kind Regards,

Joel - Bose Support