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

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: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?

[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.