Google’s suite of products in the past few years have been pretty awesome overall, with Chromecast and Home devices among the best. However, there’s now a confirmed issue with multiple routers where Google’s devices are the cause of temporary outages.
Myce explains that Google Home and Chromecast devices are causing temporary outages on many routers from ASUS, Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link, and Synology. The issues vary from router to router with some becoming totally inoperable for a short period of time, and others simply dropping their internet connection.
Users have been asking about this for quite some time, but haven’t been able to find any solutions. Recently, a TP-Link engineer posted an explanation on what exactly is going on.
The short explanation here is that Google’s devices often send a lot of information at once when they wake up from sleep mode. Because of this, many routers will simply shut down the connection either to the internet or to the device’s they are connected to.
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 the “sleep mode”, and could exceed more than 100,000 packets in a short amount of time. The longer your device is in “sleep”, the larger this packet burst will be. This issue may eventually cause some of router’s primary features to shut down – including wireless connectivity.
It’s unclear if Google is aware of the situation and planning to implement a fix, but we will reach out to the company for a statement and update this article with any response. In the meantime, router makers themselves, including TP-Link, are actually releasing new firmware to help fix the problem.
Update: Google has responded regarding this issue. A spokesperson says that Google’s “team is working quickly to share a solution.”
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