Hello,

I set my new ER605 Omada Router up second in a Router cascade. When recently monitoring the network devices traffic, I noticed the Router regularly pinging google.com every minute or so. After some quick research, I found similar cases with TP-Link devices showing this behaviour with google.com and other popular domains in order to detect online connection (for example here for a consumer hotspot).

Trying to verify whether this is also the case for my device, I added a custom DNS resolution in order to block the connection to google.com and see what happens: Even after hours of the ER605 not beeing able to reach the pinged domain, the status LED did not change and also connection is shown as stable in the Omada backend. Checking the logfiles, there were no other domains pinged during that time. I did the testing without any devices connected, exception beeing the omada software controller on a docker container beeing run for some time to check whether Omada backend shows any errors.

Digging deeper, I also checked the data protection agreement (the german version has a part about hardware not included in the international one) but also no mention of transfering any data to google here. I also opted out in the software of anonymous data collection and uploading data to the cloud.

So my question remains - what does this ping do any why is it here? I'm honestly a little concerned because google has shown many times it does not respect the european data protection laws to it's full extend.

Than you very much for your help!