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.

Comments

Always recording?

[b0s0z0ku]

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?

Re:Always recording?

[110010001000]

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.

Re:Always recording?

[Xenx]

From TP-Link's statement on the C1200 update, it looks like it's MDNS multicast discovery packets.

Re:Always recording?

[msauve]

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.

Re:Always recording?

[peragrin]

nope, google home, and chromecast use multicastDNS like apple bojour to locate devices on the same access point.

a quiet side effect is chromecasts, don't work well in multi wireless access point networks. (ie a computer connecting to you AP can't reach devices connected to another AP)

the issue is some update is basically spamming mdns requests across all nodes which is causeing network congestion.

some routers are going so far as to limit udp trafffic from google products to prevent network congestion issues.

Why google hasn't issued an update is anyone's guess.

Re:Always recording?

[rwven]

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.

Re:Always recording?

[Xenx]

Given that other major players are also affected by the issue, I doubt that "inept" is the answer here. Things are generally designed they way they are for price and performance. It likely hasn't been a realistic concern until now.

Re:Always recording?

[gl4ss]

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.

Re:Always recording?

[hawguy]

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.

TP-Link?

[msauve]

"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.

Re:TP-Link?

[MatthiasF]

There's more to throughput than simply bandwidth.

For instance, most enterprise grade routers are rated for packets per second (PPS).

A cheap enterprise-grade 4-5 port router with a 2-core 500Mhz processor will most likely be rated around 1 million PPS while a 4-core at 1Ghz will be able to handle over 3 million PPS.

For comparison, the latest version of the of the TP-Link Archer C1200 mentioned in the article has only a 1-core processor running at 900Ghz processor which I assume would be rated around 800,000 PPS.

So, if one model of home device alone puts out 100,000 packets suddenly and there are more than one of the device in the house (Google Home in 2-3 rooms, Chrome Cast on 2-3 TVs), it all adds up pretty quickly on top of normal use in the background.

Re:TP-Link?

[TheDarkMaster]

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.

Re:TP-Link?

[msauve]

This issue is these cheap "routers." Here's more detail.

First, the issue 'taint got nuttin' to do with routing. The Google devices are sending lots of mcast traffic which affects WiFi. That's strictly a WiFi AP/bridging function. Second, although it may clog WiFi for a while, there's no excuse for an AP to crash because of it.

Third, people need to stop calling these things routers. That's like saying Dr. Dre is a Doctor. They don't route multicast, they don't do routing protocols. Most won't even route between networks, they'll only do some forms of NAT. They're cheap, home, multifunction (most of them have internal switches and/or APs) NAT gateways, not routers. In this case, it's an AP issue, not a router issue.

I'm not sure what a "A cheap enterprise-grade 4-5 port router" is. Any modern enterprise router will do wirespeed to at least 10G. There may be some SOHO ones which still use a CPU to do forwarding and where pps is still the bottleneck. There are certainly firewalls which do cpu forwarding. But none of them will crap out when packets arrive faster than they can forward them - they'll just drop some.

Re:TP-Link?

[msauve]

Whether or not the Google device's behavior is technically correct/allowed (it is) or polite/proper/necessary (it isn't), a network device should not crash because of it.

Re:TP-Link?

[thegarbz]

So, TP-Link "routers" can crap out when you send 200 MB through them?

No. TP-Link routers can crap out when you send 200MB multicasting at a very short interval, something that no client is expected to do.

Time to buy a competitor's product.

Whose? D-Link, and ASUS both have come out and said they are affected. This problem is affecting my father's top of the line D-Link modem/router too. It also apparently affects Google's WiFi as well as Apple's Airport.

There's more to data than just how much is going through.

The battle of the throttles

[aberglas]

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.

Re:The battle of the throttles

[complete loony]

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.

Re:TP-Link

[viperidaenz]

Als impacts routers from Asus, Linksys, Netgear and Synology. Possibly more.

TP-Link are the ones who figured out what the cause was.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Hmmm, that could be the

[bobbied]

LOL, that router is trash anyway... They released the firmware update to fix the LAST firmware update that the had to pull because it totally hosed up the router beyond reasonable recovery. Seems the radio has some major issues and all their attempts to fix it thus far have failed.

How do I know this? Because I have one, collecting dust, because I got tired of having to factory reset the thing every few hours to get it working again. You could make it last a bit longer if you turned off literally EVERYTHING you don't absolutely need, including IPV6, prioritization and certainly the VPM stuff, but even running stripped of all but the essentials I'd get a day or two out of it before it was time to factory reset again.

Horrible router.. Get ANYTHING other than the Linksys WRT3200ACM.... Seriously, the WRT1900 is even better..

So they release ANOTHER firmware load? Does this one actually work? I'd love to dust off mine and actually use it for more than a paperweight.