One of our Google Home’s is in our Child’s Room so it can play music for her while she sleeps.  To play music through your Google Home, you have to link a streaming music account to your Google Home, and more information how to do that can be found here: Listen to Music.

We have tested using a free Pandora account and Google Play’s Free Radio stations.  I found that the Google Play’s Free Radio stations works best and was more reliable. Google Home also supports Spotify Premium account and YouTube music which is part of the paid YouTube Red service.  You can link multiple accounts to your google home, but you have to select one as the default player.

Google Play’s Free Radio is essentially a collection of Genres, Songs, and Artists that you can ask Google Home to play, and I have yet to have advertising interrupt the playlist.  I tend to say  ” Hey Google, play relaxing Bedtime Songs”, that does the trick for my need.

Our Google Home plays music from 730PM to 630AM in my child’s room, and that made me wonder how much data does this take?  Fortunately, I have a Cisco Meraki Access Point which provides some insight.

To find which Google Home to analysis was more difficult than I thought, because the Cisco Meraki AP reports the client name based off of NETBIOS name, but once I looked at the traffic I was able to make a reasonable guess as to which one was in my child’s room, and I found this great Graph!

Interesting enough, the Google Home downloaded 10.54 GB of data for the last week and uploaded 300.8 MB of data.  I was actually surprised at how much data the Google Home uploaded for a Week so this will lead to of packet capture test and analysis for my next post.

The download throughput of ~350Kb/s what makes sense because Google Play Radio streams music at 320 Kb/s, and for this, you get a great sound quality that puts your child to sleep…. Well, Sometimes.