Essential tech news

OTHER GOOGLE CAST DEVICES, INCLUDING HOME, MAY ALSO BE MISBEHAVING.

IF YOU’VE EXPERIENCED Wi-Fi dropouts and slow speeds on your home network recently, certain Google devices might be to blame. The issue was reported on the forums of several router manufacturers, leading one representative from router-maker TP-Link to return with an explanation. “From what we have gathered so far, the issue appears to be related to some recent releases of Android OS and Google Apps,” said the representative, further explaining that the “issue stems from these devices’ Cast feature, which sends MDNS multicast discovery packets in order to keep a live connection with Google products such as Google Home”.

At the time of writing, Google had identified the bug and promised that a fix will be rolling out to Android phones via a Play Store update. In the meantime, router manufacturers began offering instructions on how to roll back to earlier versions of their firmware that protect against this problem. Linksys, on the other hand, has already incorporated “a new WLAN driver that will help mitigate an issue that was discovered where Android devices coming in and out of sleep mode would crash the Wireless Network”. Google was expecting to rollout out a fix of its own, which should hopefully be available by the time you read this. [ STEPHEN LAMBRECHTS ]