I've been having issues a plenty with data connectivity, especially recently (possibly correlated to V9). I've been working with a tech at Tesla on it, but so far, limited progress. They keep asking for more timestamps to check into -- given them about 5-10 already. Mine started with reporting voice recognition issues, but they are treating it as a data connectivity issue.
For me, it exhibits as any or some of the following:
- streaming audio not working (independent of the Slacker server issues that were happening)
- map tiles (segments) not loading
- voice commands not working (just not sending to the server and timing out)
- web browser unable to load pages (no indication or progress or timeout)
- web browser bandwidth very poor (using fast.com very limited - ~200-800 kbps instead of 20-80 Mbps)
- showing network disconnected on top row icon
I think their cellular stack is completely mucked up in some way. Having been in the cellular business for a bit, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Even the vendors of the chips/stacks seem to struggle to get them working properly.
I had some issues early on with LTE (and lots of fallback to 3G), but after an update or two, it seemed to become consistently more reliable, but then in the past 2 updates (especially with 2018.39.x), it has gotten really bad. However, the problems are not clearly linked to a specific software release (at least that is visible to us users -- who knows if they are updating some modules/subsystems behind the scenes or not).
On the roaming comments made by someone above -- that doesn't make for poor coverage. The Tesla tech you got the information from doesn't know how cellular systems work. It's the same as if you were on a local network (in general), there can be carrier applied bandwidth limiting etc, but the underlying radio access technology (RAT) is the same, so coverage is identical to being on a local carrier. In the general case, when it's AT&T (which is what Tesla uses I believe), it prefers to roam on the Rogers network.