Perhaps this is why it is taking a surprisingly long time to sort this out. The low bandwidth issue has shown that there are much more serious problems that need to be worked out as well.
-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
LTE Throttling since 11/3/17
- Thread starter AMPUP
- Start date
-
- Tags
- Model S Poll User Interface
HankLloydRight
No Roads
Yeah, I think there is truth to this.. like "HOLY CRAP! THERE'S HUGE SECTIONS OF CODE THAT NEVER GOT WRITTEN!" (like graceful error handling).
How many times have you see code like this?
Code:
function foo() {
/* we'll get to this later */
return true;
}
Apologies if this was attempted earlier in this post as I read through the 9 pages quickly...
1. Has anyone tested slacker with the car connected to a wifi hot spot to see if the streaming media issue persists? I'll try it out this weekend but it seems like one way to rule out LTE as a culprit.
2. Anyone with 3G having issues with Slacker? My last car had 3G (A notably slower connection than LTE) and Slacker/Tune-in worked well.
1. Has anyone tested slacker with the car connected to a wifi hot spot to see if the streaming media issue persists? I'll try it out this weekend but it seems like one way to rule out LTE as a culprit.
2. Anyone with 3G having issues with Slacker? My last car had 3G (A notably slower connection than LTE) and Slacker/Tune-in worked well.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
Ok, I'm now convinced that this is an AT&T problem related only to LTE.
I was at the Milford Service center today for our semi-annual SC Staff appreciation gathering.. and had a chance to jump into a friend's car with 3G.
Right away, using fast.com, we were able to consistently get 2.2mbps speeds on 3G. On my car, parked right next to him with LTE (although just one bar of signal), I could only get about 200kbps. But that's also very consistent for me no matter where I am or how many bars of signal I have on LTE... I've been averaging about 200kbps for the last month or more.
Both cars were proxied through Jasper Networks, so I retract my previous assertions that this is a Jasper networks problem (unless Jasper Networks is throttling LTE connections only, but I can't imagine that's a realistic cause).
So it's either AT&T throttling these cars, or something changed in the last firmware update to cause LTE to be stuck at about 200kbps.
While at the service center with most of the staff around having lunch, I asked about the LTE throttling, and they pretty much "shoo shoo"'d me away, saying that you can't rely on any speed test in the browser, and I "didn't know what server it was using". But that's CYA B.S. .. fast.com is most basic HTML5 speed test available, and extremely consistent. So they wouldn't admit this is a real problem, and instead blamed the streaming problems on Slacker recently upgrading the security on their servers, which affects all car makers who provide streaming audio, not just Tesla. So while that certainly might be true, and they said that Tesla is working on a firmware update to fix it, the problem has to be exacerbated by LTE being severely throttled.
None of this though explains "Loading Errors" on BT audio and USB.
I was at the Milford Service center today for our semi-annual SC Staff appreciation gathering.. and had a chance to jump into a friend's car with 3G.
Right away, using fast.com, we were able to consistently get 2.2mbps speeds on 3G. On my car, parked right next to him with LTE (although just one bar of signal), I could only get about 200kbps. But that's also very consistent for me no matter where I am or how many bars of signal I have on LTE... I've been averaging about 200kbps for the last month or more.
Both cars were proxied through Jasper Networks, so I retract my previous assertions that this is a Jasper networks problem (unless Jasper Networks is throttling LTE connections only, but I can't imagine that's a realistic cause).
So it's either AT&T throttling these cars, or something changed in the last firmware update to cause LTE to be stuck at about 200kbps.
While at the service center with most of the staff around having lunch, I asked about the LTE throttling, and they pretty much "shoo shoo"'d me away, saying that you can't rely on any speed test in the browser, and I "didn't know what server it was using". But that's CYA B.S. .. fast.com is most basic HTML5 speed test available, and extremely consistent. So they wouldn't admit this is a real problem, and instead blamed the streaming problems on Slacker recently upgrading the security on their servers, which affects all car makers who provide streaming audio, not just Tesla. So while that certainly might be true, and they said that Tesla is working on a firmware update to fix it, the problem has to be exacerbated by LTE being severely throttled.
None of this though explains "Loading Errors" on BT audio and USB.
bareyb
Active Member
Well. They DID say they were going to take care of this "in the new year" so let's hope they meant early in the New Year. I'm really sick of this. I was giving my visiting niece and nephews a ride today and it happened about five times in a row. They couldn't get any of "their songs" to play reliably. It's freaking embarrassing.
Your post reminded me to reply to this thread. I have been having this issue since it has been reported and after hearing all the stories, I think what is occurring is that Tesla has some kind of contract with AT&T that limits their entire fleet to a certain amount of LTE data per year. I think that this year, that data limit was exceeded around the time this problem was first noticed. After the data cap was reached, AT&T began throttling all Tesla data. I am willing to bet that this problem will go away on January 1st and Tesla will not even mention what the actual problem was.
If my theory is correct, this doesn’t bode well for when all those Model 3s start getting to customers.
One other note... this problem is much worse if you have a satellite nav map up at the same time as your streaming radio.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
I certainly agree this is a problem with AT&T, but if they're throttling all Tesla data, why are 3G cars unaffected?
Also, I think it seems kinda strange to buy cellular bandwidth "by the year" so to speak. If anything, it would be a yearly contract with a monthly cap.
I also believe we can apply Hanlon's Razor to this problem: (see: Hanlon's razor - Wikipedia)
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Or as another TMC member taught me the British/Aussie version:
"Cock-up before conspiracy"
By that I mean that it's not an intentional thing by Tesla or AT&T (i.e. bandwidth limits), but it will turn out to be some sort of mis-configuration in the LTE firmware in either the AT&T cell towers or in our cars.
Which come to think of it, are Canadian owners with LTE experiencing the same problems, or is it US only? If it's US only, it's most definitely an AT&T problem.
I agree. ATT have been upgrading towers and things which I have seen cause unintended problems of various types. My guess is they made some change to their LTE that has screwed things up, and that Tesla's music software has poor error handling that has amplified the problem.
If att is throttling the LTE service it definitely is not to every car. As I noted above, I recently had a loaner vehicle that received data at speeds 10 times faster than my car. So if att is the culprit, it is selective vehicle throttling. My SC insists it is a bug in the recent firmware and not an att issue.
Tested a few times today and the streaming music is 100% correlated in my case to LTE.
Leave LTE and get speeds between 40 and 200 kbps. MCU will reboot every ~20 min when attempting streaming.
Connect WiFi hotspot (Verizon from iPhone 7)
Speeds 1.2-2.2 mbps and streaming radio works flawlessly with no mcu reboots.
Running 8.1 2017.40.1
Leave LTE and get speeds between 40 and 200 kbps. MCU will reboot every ~20 min when attempting streaming.
Connect WiFi hotspot (Verizon from iPhone 7)
Speeds 1.2-2.2 mbps and streaming radio works flawlessly with no mcu reboots.
Running 8.1 2017.40.1
Attachments
You know, I really have no problem with paying for the data connection in my car if that's the problem. That said, I'd A) want to be able to use my own sim and B) I'd want to be able to turn off the "phone home every night" crap. My AP1 car uploads ~400MB of data each month. I can't imagine what AP2+ cars are uploading.
Richard34212
Member
No change for me either on 50.2. It makes no difference what the signal strength is. I've seen 35KBPS with 4 bars and 1MBPS with 1 bar. Way too slow for any data sensitive applications to work properly. I can't believe they've allowed this problem to go on for months.
The same here (50.2) - I dont even pay attention to signal strength anymore as skipping and buffering occurs even with good signal. Really hopping that the theory about Tesla exhausting all allocated bandwidth for 2017 is correct and we get full functionality in just a few days as 2018 rolls in.
Richard34212
Member
I agree completely that this is not a signal strength problem. The reason I always check it is that it's always the first excuse offered as to why there is skipping and buffering. While it's obviously true that if the signal really was weak enough, at some point that would cause this problem, a strong signal proves that this is not the case.
This also affects Tune-in, but in a different way - some channels disappear completely over LTE and reappear over WiFi. I think it is a problem with how Tesla servers handle streaming formats over LTE. I know both Tunein and Slacker have added different bitrate and stream types over the past year, and likely Tesla servers are not handling them well.
I'm in Canada, so AT&T is not a factor, and my LTE speeds are 1.2-2.0 MBS. Switiching to WiFi seems to bypass Tesla servers for content, so this seems the most likely situation to me.
Yep. I don't give test rides anymore. I'm really starting to dislike my car.
Which makes total sense if the problem is
Same here. If anything it's worse now with MCU rebooting every now and then when slacker fails.
Similar threads
