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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.
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.
From TP-Link's statement on the C1200 update, it looks like it's MDNS multicast discovery packets.
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
Als impacts routers from Asus, Linksys, Netgear and Synology. Possibly more.
TP-Link are the ones who figured out what the cause was.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.