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Premium connectivity
- Thread starter Valcho
- Start date
E90alex
Active Member
Yes. Just turn on your iPhone personal hotspot and then connect your Model Y to the network. That is of course if your cellular plan includes hotspot data.
You won’t have full premium connectivity features with wifi/hotspot though FYI. You lose satellite maps and live traffic visualization, but everything else should work.
Also make sure to turn on remain connected to wifi in drive, otherwise wifi will disconnect when you shift out of park and you have to manually reconnect again.
You won’t have full premium connectivity features with wifi/hotspot though FYI. You lose satellite maps and live traffic visualization, but everything else should work.
Also make sure to turn on remain connected to wifi in drive, otherwise wifi will disconnect when you shift out of park and you have to manually reconnect again.
pepperoni
Member
So what does a hotspot give you if you don’t get satellite maps and traffic visualization. Spotify, TuneIn, etc, can all be accessed from your phone and linked via Bluetooth, and the phone Spotify app is much better than the Tesla app. How is the hotpot better than Bluetooth? Genuinely curious.
E90alex
Active Member
It lets you access those services through the car screen and not the phone. If you don’t care about that or don’t prefer that then it’s not better for you and don’t use hotspot then. But other people might prefer to use the car and not the phone.
Also BT audio streaming loses quality vs directly playing the media but it’s not noticeable for most people.
buddhafree
2022 MYP
Yes.
If you don't purchase Premium Connectivity you can't use Sentry Mode - View Live Camera which is a very cool feature IMHO.
Tesla recently announce an annual subscription price for Premium Connectivity of $99/year + tax. This saves you 20% over the monthly plan. In comparison I had GM's On-Star data plan with my 2017 Chevrolet Volt and was paying $20/month for a limited data plan. In comparison Tesla's Premium Connectivity is a bargain at $99/year.
pepperoni
Member
Totally agree about personal preference. It’s very easy to control my phone with Siri, so the Tesla screen isn’t a big advantage for me.
Interesting point about audio quality, but I’m thinking Bluetooth should provide better Spotify audio quality. Tesla connects over LTE and throttles Spotify to 96kbps. No idea if it does the same thing with a hotspot connection, but it wouldn’t surprise me. My iPhone connects to my car using Bluetooth AAC codec at 250 kbps, and I subscribe to Spotify Premium with rates up to 320 kbps. Even the free version streams at 160, higher than the Tesla app. More important question is whether I could even tell the difference, and I’m betting It would be challenging in a blind test with road noise in the background.
I’ve been using the Tesla Spotify app lately, and find lacks many features that I use (no history?). On the plus side, I can access it using Tesla voice control. I can also use Siri on my phone to access my phone’s Spotify app.
I have free Tesla Premium Connectivity for a year with my new car, so have time to figure out whether I like it enough to subscribe. After three weeks of ownership, I’m struggling to see the value proposition, or for that matter, even the value of using a Wi-Fi hotspot. Bluetooth seems to be just fine for me.
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Bassmanbrett
Member
You beat me to it. View Live Camera in Sentry Mode is one of the most attractive features to me.
Even if you can utilize some of the other features through hot spot or BT, the Premium Connectivity annual plan comes out to about $8/month. I think it's totally worth it to not have to fool with your phone.
You sure you have it for a year? My MYP only had a 30 day free trial.
pepperoni
Member
Yes. I ordered in September when the offer was for 1 year. Since then, they dropped it to 30 days.
buddhafree
2022 MYP
You got me curious with 96kbps limit on Spotify. I didn't find any solid proof but people are saying it was addressed last year. The Spotify should use 320kbps or close to it now.
Has Spotify bitrate increased??
I haven't seen anyone talking about this, apart from @greentheonly mentioning it on twitter recently. This morning I checked for myself, and I think he might be right! For context; I stop short of claiming to be an audiophile, but I am pretty picky when it comes to music listening. I always...
teslamotorsclub.com
pepperoni
Member
I can’t claim to be an authority on this, but this guy did a test and calculated 96kbps. It was a few years ago, so it is possible it streams at a higher rate now. I might just try it with my home Wi-Fi and look at the data rate streaming through my router.You got me curious with 96kbps limit on Spotify. I didn't find any solid proof but people are saying it was addressed last year. The Spotify should use 320kbps or close to it now.
Has Spotify bitrate increased??
I haven't seen anyone talking about this, apart from @greentheonly mentioning it on twitter recently. This morning I checked for myself, and I think he might be right! For context; I stop short of claiming to be an audiophile, but I am pretty picky when it comes to music listening. I always...
pepperoni
Member
I was curious, so I tested it. I watched my Tesla Wi-Fi traffic on my home router using my iPad while I played about a dozen songs I hadn’t played before using Spotify. The song gets downloaded all at once, so one needs to look at the total MB of the song. For example, a 5 minute song might be 2.5 MB, equivalent to (2500*8)/(5*60) = 67 kbps. I saw that most songs had a 40-80 kbps rate, and I never saw anything reach or exceed 96. I tried the same thing on my iPhone and the file sizes were about 2x larger, and clearly exceeding 96. I never saw anything there getting anywhere close to 320 (the max I should see with my premium account). I’m guessing the density of the music affects the compression, where a fast punk rock tune would not compress as much as, say, John Cage 4’33”, even using the same 320 kbps encoding.You got me curious with 96kbps limit on Spotify. I didn't find any solid proof but people are saying it was addressed last year. The Spotify should use 320kbps or close to it now.
Has Spotify bitrate increased??
I haven't seen anyone talking about this, apart from @greentheonly mentioning it on twitter recently. This morning I checked for myself, and I think he might be right! For context; I stop short of claiming to be an audiophile, but I am pretty picky when it comes to music listening. I always...
Bottom line, I believe the Tesla Spotify app is still using 96 kbps encoding.
buddhafree
2022 MYP
I did my own research. I played 3 songs from Pink Floyd The Wall album and analyzed results using Palo Alto firewall. It's a Next Gen firewall that can identify applications, URLs etc. I've identified URL destinations where Spotify downloaded music from and checked total bytes transferred from the identified addresses only. Spotify transferred around 60MB for songs that take 21.67MB compressed MP3 with 320kbps encoding. What did I learn? Spotify pre-caches songs from the playlist (downloading songs ahead of time, not just 3 songs I have played) making all my efforts useless. I also learned that I wasted my time and should have watched movie instead 
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