The issue of Chromecast enabled devices slowing down WiFi routers has been a massive problem for many users with routers from a wide range of manufacturers affected. Google has acknowledged the problem and now a fix is apparently on the way.
The issue was noted over the last week, with users finding their WiFi networks slowing to a crawl. This was due to Chromecast enabled devices including Google Home products, Chromecast and other cast enabled speakers effectively spamming the network with ‘keep alive’ MDNS multicast discovery packets.
Google has announced on their support page that they have a fix for the issue, which will be resolved through an update to Google Play Services. The update to Google Play Services will start rolling out this Thursday, the 18th of January in the US – so, effectively tomorrow for us here in Australia.
It’s been a real problem for a lot of users, so hopefully this fixes it right up.
The Nexus Player suffered the same issue on Oreo (delaying release), it seems Google hadn’t learnt from that debacle.