Morning all, after some assistance as sonos themselves were rather unhelpful and despite me being pretty clear with my issue, they seemed to be discussing something entirely different.
I've removed my playbase and replaced it with the beam gen 2. My previous setup consisted of playbase+2x Play1s as rears. The playbase was connected via ethernet and the rears connected directly to the playbase via sonosnet.
I added the beam (ethernet), re-added the rears as surrounds but then they seemed to be cutting out. Looking further, I could see they were connecting via my wifi rather than sonosnet. I've reset everything, to default, added the beam again, then added the Play1s and then added them as surrounds to the beam, but again they will not connect via its own mesh and instead via my wifi and again keep cutting out (I went so far as to turning off my wifi access point to test if they would force onto sonosnet and no).
I spoke with sonos who said everything looks correct but didn't seem to understand sonosnet and its own mesh. I then suggested how it worked previously and had no issues and he said it was because the beam now supports 5ghz (as in, can *connect* to a 5ghz wifi network) and that because of that the beam can only connect on 2.4ghz to the rears and not directly. I then asked if there was anyone else I could speak to about the issue and he said that they would tell me the same and it won't change. If I call them, they will not say anything different.
All very surprising really, I assumed their support would be pretty clued up and helpful.
Any suggestions / tips before I send the beam back? I can't have the rears using my wifi instead of mesh, it does not work reliably at all and just cuts out every few seconds.