Google Home speakers download huge amounts of data

The new Google Home speaker has a problem: It downloads hundreds of gigabytes of data in the background for some owners.

Over the past week, several reports have emerged about how the Google Home Speaker appears to be constantly downloading data from the company’s servers.

In my case, a Google Home speaker that hasn’t been used in the last day for voice commands or media streaming consumed 17GB of data in 24 hours. At 3 a.m. PT, it downloaded 9.99 GB. Given the timing, this could be related to failed attempts to download the device’s firmware.

Meanwhile, on October 13, the same commenter downloaded 41 GB of data. Over the last 30 days, the total download is 132 GB.

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It is unclear if this is a widespread problem. Another one of our lightly used home speakers (in another household) has only downloaded 2GB of data in the last month.

Most routers allow you to check how much data a particular device is using. If you’re using Nest Wifi, go to the Google Home app’s top Wifi tab > Devices > select your speaker > Device usage graphs. You can switch between 1, 7 and 30 day charts.

We are not seeing this download issue with other Google Home and Nest devices, including multiple Nest Hubs in the same home as the affected home speaker.

If you have multiple home speakers and a limited data plan, this problem could easily exceed your cap, as some have found.

In a statement to 9to5Google Today, the company acknowledged the issue and said that “a patch is already being rolled out to resolve this issue for users.”