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Contemporary Wi-Fi and upgrades

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Unless your gaming or transferring gigabytes of files, this is not generally a concern. And if it is, you can set up an old 2.4 GHz access point for your Model S as an adjunct to your main router.
Sure, the user could go through the trouble of doing that, but that's not the best possible user experience. The point is that the user's experience could be improved, and presumably the cost to Tesla is marginal (these chips are all pretty cheap right?), so I think it does make sense.
 
These guys went out of their way to measure the wifi mirror antennas back in 2014. I can't find the test results, however :( Anyone up for the task?

Cool video from the testing:

Close-up of the mirror antenna:
1551576_641370619313584_2380464937998651473_n.jpg


Data overlay showing the hemispherical near-field antenna pattern:
10007047_641370625980250_113725891567941748_n.jpg
 
Sure, the user could go through the trouble of doing that, but that's not the best possible user experience. The point is that the user's experience could be improved, and presumably the cost to Tesla is marginal (these chips are all pretty cheap right?), so I think it does make sense.

IMHO, most Tesla owners aren't going to notice or care if their car does 802.11a/b/g/n/ac or whatever. My WAG is that the dominating cost of moving to a new wireless chipset is the engineering, testing, etc. process, not the incremental cost of the chipset.

If Tesla has to design or redesign the wireless communication subsystem, I'd hope that whomever is in charge of the design would be evaluating newer chipsets. But remember that as outsiders we're not going to be privy to that evaluation / decision process, we only see the end result.

Bruce.
 
If anything, you can argue that putting low-bandwidth-requirement devices on 2.4GHz frees up 5GHz from being affected. I've looked at performance differences between OFDM-only 2.4GHz networks (e.g. N only) vs ones that maintain G compatiblity and it's extremely negligible.
 
Giving this thread a bump.

There is now more documentation out there about "MCU2", aka Main Computing Unit Version 2, which came out in March 2018. It appears to have 5GHz Wi-Fi (which means at least 802.11n, and quite possibly 802.11ac). There may be Bluetooth 5, but I have not found confirmed documentation on that. I would still like updated chipset information!

References:
Undocumented | TeslaTap
MCU1 to MCU2 | TeslaTap
Elon Musk confirms new Tesla MCU can be retrofitted, but new software will provide accelerated rendering

My 2017 (Aug,. 2017 build, I think; delivered Oct, 2017) seems to have 5GHz WiFi. I put an access point in my garage and its software tells me it is connected to the Tesla on 5.