Your Google Home could be killing your Wi-Fi
Google’s “Cast†feature may be interfering with home Wi-Fi connections, and there’s no fix in sight.
Apparently, Google Home and Chromecast devices are overloading routers with information, causing them to crash.
A TP-Link engineer shared some insight about what may be causing the issue:
This issue stems from these devices’ “Cast†feature, which sends MDNS multicast discovery packets in order to discover and keep a live connection with Google products such as Google Home. These packets normally sent in a 20-second interval. However, we have discovered that the devices will sometimes broadcast a large amount of these packets at a very high speed in a short amount of time. This occurs when the device is awakened from its “sleep†state, and could exceed more than 100,000 packets.
Routers from ASUS, Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link, and Synology are all reportedly experiencing outages. According to 9to5Google, the problem has been going on for a while, but has only come to light following an influx of new Google Home owners.
The good news is Google is aware of the issue and is working on a solution, though there’s no timeline as to when a fix will be released. Which is a shame, because it means people can’t fully enjoy Google’s growing suite of smart speakers until a solution is found.
If you’re experiencing a regular occurrence of outages, your best bet would be to unplug your Google Home device until Google introduces a fix.
Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2018/01/16/your-google-home-could-be-killing-your-wi-fi/