OK... so looking at the speed test information I got, I'm noticing a few things.
1) The speeds are higher than I'd expect for 3G and the upload speed is quite ridiculously high
2) Web pages do not load very smoothly on the browser - people blame the speed of the 3G connection
3) Latency is extremely high
4) The IP seen by the speed test server is registered to a company in New York state (a little odd, since I'm on the west side of Canada!)
Somewhere I saw a mention in passing of a VPN connection between the car and the Tesla mothership. I think this is almost certainly the case. Meaning, all data to and from the car is encrypted through a tunnel to Tesla's VPN server, before heading out into the Internet from the Tesla gateway/firewall. It might also be compressed, which could explain the speeds (especially upload).
This makes sense if you're trying to keep the car's connection secure, however it's not without problems.
1) The apparent responsiveness of the web browser is not limited only by the 3G connection, but also by the Tesla server and gateway/firewall and all the additional routing jumps along the way.
2) Latency is increased by all the encryption and decryption steps involved and the possible network load at the Tesla server and gateway. Again, this will be seen as an unresponsive browser.
Normally with a VPN, you route only the sensitive data through the encrypted tunnel, and route everything else outside. In this case, sensitive car data would go through the tunnel, but web traffic would not. AT&T, (Rogers in Canada) will be assigning a public IP to the car's connection and the car will also have a private IP seen through the tunnel. The web data would use the public IP and I'll wager the performance of the browser would appear MUCH improved. However, since there would be the potential (emphasize 'potential') that a black hat could find their way into the car via the public IP, the safe thing to do is force ALL data to go through the Tesla gateway. The car would not accept ANY connection other than the VPN itself, thus the security is entrusted to the Tesla gateway and firewall. Which would make sense, in the paranoid world that is the Internet.
I wonder if the Internet radio is also routed this way... probably 'yes'.
I will try a speed test via a wifi network just to see if that NY IP range appears... I suspect it will and that a tunnel is built through the wifi connection as well.
What I think is important in all this is that if I'm right, the system responsiveness (or lack of responsiveness) is determined by the mothership. It's quite likely that the processing power in the car is more than adequate to provide a smooth and snappy experience.
FWIW, I tried ordering a pizza on-line from pizzahut.ca via the car browser the other night and just about gave up in frustration. 400 ms latency is simply unworkable. My phone was better able to manage it. When I tested the phone, I found 65 ms latency when locked to either 4G or LTE. I can't force it to 3G, but don't recall latency being more than 150 ms or so typically when that was the standard technology. Could be wrong, but 400 ms seems unreasonably high for 3G.
