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Google Home and Chromecast Could Be Overloading Your Home Wi-Fi (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the information-overload dept.

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.

6 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Always recording? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A Google Home is just a smart mic that responds to a keyword. What is it storing in "sleep" mode that it needs to spit back to Google when it wakes up? Is it recording at all times and spewing compressed audio back to the mothership?

    1. Re:Always recording? by rwven · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Always recording? by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Interesting

      there's a timer on sending some packets.

      send every x seconds.

      when it's in sleep, it sends it for whatever it missed when sleeping. probably same data, I suppose.

      a not that uncommon glitch.

      it just proves google doesn't give a fuck about quality anymore than others.

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      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Its the router stupid by Dorianny · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The headline should read "Google Home and Chromecast Could Be Overloading" the horribly implemented network stack of you routers software. Do yourself a favor and get a router supported by dd-wrt/open-wrt/tomatoe or even better one that already uses one of those already

  3. The battle of the throttles by aberglas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have an slowish ADSL line. At regular intervals various Daemons on various computes wake up and decide to download gigabytes of junk. Microsoft update is the worst offender, but there are many others. They all do so at maximum speed, killing the internet access.

    So on my Gargoyle router, I throttle all the download addresses that these services use. But they daemons are smart. They keep finding new servers to download from. I currently have about 50 /24 sites throttled, but more appear every week or so.

    Dropbox and Google Drive can be throttled locally nothing else seems to have that ability unless one gets into heavy group policy configs or jailbreak Apples.

  4. Re:TP-Link? by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Funny, you do not think the problem may be actually in fact Chromecast clogging the router with requests when he should not be doing this? I've been seeing similar behavior in Google Chrome, it insists on creating an avalanche of UDP connections to mDNS that easily knocks down any home router not expecting such abuse.

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    Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time