Bad Wifi? Google might be interfering with your home internet without you knowning

There is rarely anything more annoying in the modern household than a slow internet connection.

Historically, there have been many causes for internet speed slowdowns - throttling at peak times, too many devices logged on at once, bad router positioning and so on.

But experts may have identified a new source of internet woe - Google products.

If you're using devices like Google Home or Chromecast in your house, you may notice a severe reduction in speed on other devices.

That's because experts claim that Google devices are sending "packet bursts" that negatively affect the performance of your router.

A Google spokesperson, in a statement to The Sun, explained that the company was aware of the problem and the tech giant was working on a solution.

"We're aware that a small number of users are having issues and our team is working quickly to share a solution" the spokeswoman told the site.

The discovery of the issues first came from router manufacturing company TP-LINK, who discovered the Google Cast products were the source of struggling connections.

Users with ASUS, Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link, and Synology routers all reported issued with the way Google Cast devices interacted with their internet connections.

Here's how TP-LINK explains the outages caused by Google devices:

“Following initial research and investigation, our engineering team is confident that they’ve determined one of the key origins of the issue. From what we have gathered so far, the issue appears to be related to some of the recent versions of Android OS and Google Apps.

“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. 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."

TP-LINK suggests rebooting your router if there's an issue, or disabling the 'Cast' feature on the devices until a fix is published by Google.

“In certain situations, a bug in the Cast software on Android phones may incorrectly send a large amount of network traffic which can slow down or temporarily impact Wi-Fi networks,” Google explained in a statement on Wednesday.

“The specific impact to the network will vary depending on the router.”

“In the meantime, try rebooting your Android phone, and check that your Wi-Fi router is running the most recent firmware version.”