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Google Home and Chromecast Could Be Overloading Your Home Wi-Fi (theverge.com)
Google Cast products could be to blame for your wonky internet connection. According to TP-Link, "The Cast feature normally sends packets of information at regular intervals to keep a live connection with products like Google Home," reports The Verge. "However, if the device is awakened from a 'sleep' mode, it will sometimes send a burst of information at once, which can overwhelm a router. The longer a Cast device has been in 'sleep' mode, the more information it might send at once." The engineer says that could exceed over 100,000 packets, an amount that "may eventually cause some of [the] router's primary features to shut down -- including wireless connectivity."
TP-Link has reportedly fixed the issue in its C1200 router, but a broader fix from Google's end has not been found.
TP-Link has reportedly fixed the issue in its C1200 router, but a broader fix from Google's end has not been found.
"that could exceed over 100,000 packets,"
Maximum sized packets are normally 1500 or less because that's the standard Enet MTU. So, TP-Link "routers" can crap out when you send 200 MB through them? Time to buy a competitor's product.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It is sending whatever the Google programmers want it to. Your conversations. Your data. Whatever they decide. And they can update it at any time to change whatever they want it to send to them. And you paid $99.
So, unless their router does mcast routing (nope, it doesn't), they should just be dropping those. And if the switch part of it can't reliably flood multicast packets, they should simply give up and quit the business.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's not the download speed that's the problem, it's that most servers pushing data to you are using a TCP protocol that actively tries to keep the bottleneck network buffer full. If all those servers swapped to BBR, which actively tries to keep that buffer empty, the problem would probably disappear.
At home I get about 4mbit through my ADSL connection. With 4 windows machines downloading OS and game updates, the internet was essentially unusable. So I now run my own DNS and redirect windows & steam download domains to an nginx proxy. That way I can use the rate limiting features of my crappy modem to throttle all traffic going to the proxy's IP.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
This is pretty much why I just dumped my Echo. The fact that I literally have no idea what it's transmitting at any given time makes me nervous. I love the idea of a voice driven assistant, but I also don't love the idea that MS/Amazon/Google could know anything I say to anyone.... I work from home and discussing sensitive business information within earshot of an always-on microphone makes me twitch.
Did you ditch your cell phone too? You're more likely to have it infected by malware and recording your conversations than to have Amazon or Google decide to break their promise that their devices only listen after the wake word.