Streaming Reliability over LTE?

[CCIE]

I’ve only had my M3 for a week, but the streaming radio has been very unreliable. It seems like it’s unable to load a new song if the LTE shows less than 4 bars. Sometimes it’ll work slowly at 3 bars. 1-2 bars and streaming totally fails.

At first I thought I was just going through dead zones for cell coverage, but I commute on the same path everyday and the places where LTE has issues are not consistent everyday. I’m wondering if I have a bad LTE module or antenna issue.

Does anyone else have sporadic LTE/Streaming service?

 

[MikeATL]

Have you tried a reboot ? Hold down steering wheel buttons.

 

[CCIE]

Have you tried a reboot ? Hold down steering wheel buttons.

Yup, did it twice today. I may try disconnecting the 12V battery this weekend to see if a full reboot helps at all.

It’s like the LTE bars represent connection speed more than signal strength/quality. At 3 LTE bars songs will sometimes load, but the light grey bar that shows song buffering is very slow. Below 3 bars and songs totally fail to load. It’s almost like the LTE is being randomly throttled.

 

[aronth5]

Today I noticed for the first time "LTE" was replaced with "3G". It's not something I normally check so it could have said "3G" before and I just never noticed. I do have occasional problems with no connection at all but on average it has been reliable as long as I have 2 bars.

 

[ev_satish]

Sometimes it takes a long time to load when changing streaming channels/playlists, wondering if it buffers if staying on same channel? But yeah it is not the most reliable compared to Pandora from my experience.

 

[gambit48]

It's pretty bad. I've tested it with streaming from my phone. iPhone has no problems. The Tesla does. Not sure what the difference is (RAM, buffer, modem speed, etc), but there's a huge difference. iPhone is Verizon, and Tesla is AT&T? This happens even out in the open where the car says it has full bars. Cycling through the different audio options eventually leads it to connect. That's what makes me suspect it's a software/hardware issue rather than anything to do with weak signal strength.