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Can someone explain why we can’t get our software updates OTR if we already pay for premium connectivity?

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Soul Surfer

Cancervivor, tech geek & musician
So here’s the thing. I pay my month stipend to premium connectivity. I guarantee you that my movie and show streaming from Plex®, Disney®, Netflix® and Prime®, not to mention my Apple® music, suck up more bandwidth than any payload from a software download. So why not just include it we pay for premium connectivity? Makes no sense to me. Any thoughts?
 
No one knows the reason except whoever made that decision at Tesla. All we can do is guess as to the reasoning.

Some software updates might be a huge download. Even if you personally stream a lot of video, there’s plenty others who don’t stream video at all so fleet wide average is probably not as high as your personal usage. But a software update has to be pushed to every single car. Not sure what their agreement is with the cell carriers but anything they can offload to wifi is going to be less data they have to pay for.

Also having to use wifi means you’re more likely to be at home instead of being somewhere else and accidentally triggering the update causing you to become stranded for 30-40 min.
 
So 2 things:

1. Premium connectivity isn’t unlimited bandwidth. At Halloween last year, I used the scary machine voice thingy in live camera sentry mode to spook kids on the street. I played around with it for a while, then I got an error message along the lines of “you have used all of your bandwidth for today”.

2. OTA software updates are around 0.5 to 2Gb, depending on the update. That’s a lot of bandwidth (google says Netflix uses around 3gb per hour for HD streaming, as a comparison) and I suspect it would just take a long time. (~40+mins for a 2gb update). While it’s not a showstopper, it costs Tesla $$, even though you offset some of that cost with premium connectivity. Which brings us back to point #1.
 
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