Tesla Wifi Sux

[jdjeff88]

I've spent the last 2.5 months in wifi hell with my SP90D. One day, my car just stopped connecting with my wifi network at home. I had been on the same network for 4 months with no problems. No setting changes, no firmware updates. Just stopped connecting. Went through every trouble shooting option I could find on the web with no luck. Was originally on an Orbi set up, so then tried a Nighthawk, then a Linksys router from 4 years ago. Tried WPA and even no security. 2.4 band only, short ssid, legacy protection, multiple car resets in all their variations, forgetting networks, manual set up....every last thing I could find to do. Talked to Tesla support multiple times. I found that I could still connect to Tesla Service, Tesla Guest and my phone as a hotspot, but no other router in any other place. I would get one second of connection, one minute of no connection, then another attempt by the car to connect and obtain an IP address (yes, I tried static IP). Many times even refused to even see other wifi networks where many existed. What fixed it? I went and found the oldest router available (an old Asus N150), used all of the shittiest settings you could have on a router (set as an AP of course), set up 7 feet from my car....and finally....a connection. It is ridiculous that my 2016 car can only connect on a standard from 2009 using the slowest and least secure settings on a router with limited range. Really, I'm just venting. Other than my car swerving sharply towards a concrete divider for no reason and then almost hitting a car next to me, all within 5 minutes, on autopilot today, everything is great!

 

[phaduman]

interesting. if you have a dashcam, you may want to capture that video segment (swerving) and show it to tesla service.

On the Wi-Fi issue: that is definitely not my experience. I have my Wi-Fi Access Point on 2nd floor (installed in central celling area, pointing down to cover the home) is easily reachable by my 2016 S75D even before I enter the garage. WPA2-PSK connection, 11AC on the AP. Not sure whether Tesla is a 11n or 11AC radio. Mine is Sep-16 build.

Quite reliable connection. Have you tried rebooting your car? Sometimes the wifi driver code on the Tesla might get into some issues and only a full reboot would help? How is your interference around your home? If you have an android phone, download wifianalyzer and run it close to your car and see what signal strength you get there and how many other channels/SSIDs are interfering.

 

[chillaban]

interesting. if you have a dashcam, you may want to capture that video segment (swerving) and show it to tesla service.

On the Wi-Fi issue: that is definitely not my experience. I have my Wi-Fi Access Point on 2nd floor (installed in central celling area, pointing down to cover the home) is easily reachable by my 2016 S75D even before I enter the garage. WPA2-PSK connection, 11AC on the AP. Not sure whether Tesla is a 11n or 11AC radio. Mine is Sep-16 build.

Quite reliable connection. Have you tried rebooting your car? Sometimes the wifi driver code on the Tesla might get into some issues and only a full reboot would help? How is your interference around your home? If you have an android phone, download wifianalyzer and run it close to your car and see what signal strength you get there and how many other channels/SSIDs are interfering.

Tesla's radio is purely 802.11b/g/n on 2.4GHz. And you cannot use certain private address ranges (I believe it's 192.168.20.xxx) that conflict with their VPN setup.


EDIT: I'd also add, almost immediately after it connects, it will establish VPN connectivity (via OpenVPN SSL VPN) to Tesla. If at any point the VPN connection stalls or drops, it will disconnect from wifi and go back to LTE for some time before re-trying wifi again. So you really wanna make sure that your network (both wifi settings and router settings) doesn't have any settings that would disconnect clients after a short idle time or limit the time a connection can be idle before it gets severed.

 

[kingjamez]

I'd bet money that you have an antenna problem. I'm not yet a tesla owner. How is the WiFi antenna connected?
-Jim

 

[zelig2]

I had lots of problems as well. It does seem to be super finicky. I wish they would give us access to the log files so we could do our own network troubleshooting. I tried a number of routers as well and the most stable was an old, I patched Apple AirPort Extreme running on just 2.4. I wasn't about to keep that going long so I switched my house to a bunch of UniFi stuff and have been happy. Anecdotal, but happy it's stable for me.

As for the antenna, I think I read it's in the side mirror.

 

[ThisIsTrue]

Have you put any LED lights in the garage? I've heard they can sometimes cause interference. OTOH, you'd think that at night, when all the lights are off, you'd be connected....

(A shot in the dark, as it were.)

 

[essmd]

Get one of the WiFi Analyzer apps on your phone and confirm your signal is good.

I had to add an WiFi extender to get good coverage in the garage, and it made a big difference and now works great.

 

[CHG-ON]

I am no genius on this at all.

I have an Apple Time Capsule as my main router and two Airport Extremes to extend the home router around the rest of the place. One extender is in my garage, about 4 feet behind the rear of the car and I have 100% signal strength. I tried putting it on the pass side of the car, where the antenna is, about six feet away and no luck. But behind the car works fine. I run it at 2.5gHz. Oh, and the other extender is in my rental apt about 11 ft to the right of the driver's side with no interference at all. I have very weak cell signal at the house, so I need these to update and I have never had a problem.

These routers are at least 4 years old.

 

[essmd]

The age of the routers are really not significant for this.

However, it appears you may have 2 competing WiFi channels, or are all the extenders on the same network?

Try rebooting everything, see if that clears it up.

My wireless router is 35 feet from the garage, and passes through several walls.

 

[Tomnook]

The age of the routers are really not significant for this.

However, it appears you may have 2 competing WiFi channels, or are all the extenders on the same network?

Try rebooting everything, see if that clears it up.

My wireless router is 35 feet from the garage, and passes through several walls.

I believe the aerial is located in the driver's side mirror (rhs side of car here in UK and lhs in the US) - my router is also 35' from the car and I get 54mbs upload and download when the mirror faces the router at the shortest distance to the house. However, if I park the car the opposite way around the signal almost disappears!

 

[essmd]

How annoying!!!

I wonder if the service center would even investigate your issue. It may take a ranger coming out to your home.

I predict they will not be aggressive as long as you are getting updates as scheduled.

You,my British friend, have a frustrating situation that is unlikely to get resolved, unless you have a very computer savvy friend who can help to troubleshoot the issue.

 

[jdjeff88]

Signal strength at the car with the original router and each subsequent router has been excellent. Both my wifi sniffer and the car show a a very strong signal (at the car, for the 5nseconds it connects at least) Yes I know the networking requirements for the car and the channel, protocol and IP address range are all good. My original and each replacement solution until putting the additional independent AP in the garage have all been 15 feet from the right side of the car through one door. I've rebooted, reset, upgraded and downgraded firmware a hundred times while troubleshooting on each of the different wifi solutions. And as I said, everything worked fine until mid January. I added an AP in garage only as a last ditch means for allowing an independent 2.4ghz network to be made available using a legacy signal on a different channel. The garage AP was actually my second attempt at this solution. I tried a netgear ex7000 in the same spot also dumbed down, and even with no security I got the same issues. My inside network is on channel six at 20/40 with the extra channel higher. I tried every configuration and channel for the inside 2.4ghz network. The garage AP is on channel 2 (20)only. When just using the inside routers (one router and several routers in AP mode) I was always careful to avoid channeI interference and use several analyzers to map signal strength and assure lack of overlap. I have rebooted the car and forgotten every prior wifi network from the car. Believe me, I have tried all of this and every other solution I could research and many of my own devising. I have been a long time wifi/router geek and am completely comfortable troubleshooting networking issues. I am one of those constantly upgrading and tweaking idiots and finally went into wifi semi-retirement by getting the Orbi system which is super fast and stable and just works...until the day my Tesla said no mas. I used the logs from the various router attempts plus wireshark to figure out what was happening on my side of the fence, and all I could really tell was that if on a dynamic IP address, I was getting a UPnP IP address request from the car every 50 to 55 seconds, a connection for 5 seconds and then repeat. On static, same thing without UPnP. I originally suspected an antenna issue as the right side mirror had been replaced, but that was in early October. Never been stumped before for this long on a network issue.... In any case, I'm gettting the wifi antenna replaced next week and will see if that will help but neither Tesla nor I suspect it will. More likely some setting corruption on the car side but no luck finding anything from the car logs.

 

[jdjeff88]

How annoying!!!

I wonder if the service center would even investigate your issue. It may take a ranger coming out to your home.

I predict they will not be aggressive as long as you are getting updates as scheduled.

You,my British friend, have a frustrating situation that is unlikely to get resolved, unless you have a very computer savvy friend who can help to troubleshoot the issue.

I AM the computer savvy friend!

And not getting updates for several months is what tipped me off. I went to the service center about this and they forced an update and promised to inspect the logs and figure this out but never got back to me so I started working with main technical support. They just recommended everything I had already tried and were quite curious about the additional troubleshooting I had done. It wasn't until yesterday morning when I decided to try dinosaur age wifi did I finally get a stable connection....and still no update to any of the 8.1 variants btw....

Not British...but a definite Anglophile! Bollux!!

 

[Lauz]

I am no genius on this at all.

I have an Apple Time Capsule as my main router and two Airport Extremes to extend the home router around the rest of the place. One extender is in my garage, about 4 feet behind the rear of the car and I have 100% signal strength. I tried putting it on the pass side of the car, where the antenna is, about six feet away and no luck. But behind the car works fine. I run it at 2.5gHz. Oh, and the other extender is in my rental apt about 11 ft to the right of the driver's side with no interference at all. I have very weak cell signal at the house, so I need these to update and I have never had a problem.

These routers are at least 4 years old.

Are you running firmware 7.6.8 (the latest version) on your airport extremes? I have found it to be extremely buggy when running multiple airports. Rolled back both at home and at work. And all problems disappeared.

 

[jdjeff88]

....and as of this morning I'm right back to having the same problem again. I. Give. Up. Hopefully the SC will be able to see something on their end that I can't see on mine.

 

[boonedocks]

We have Apple Airports all over the house and my (sold) 2015 S85D and my new S100D connect solidly to my home network. Just standard default setup and security on the home network, set up as a single network so we can walk anywhere in our home and have full connectivity. 3 of the Airports are hardwire network connected back to a switch homerun and the other 4 are just part of the network via airport to airport wifi. My car will connect to one in the living room, or wiring closet or garage were it sleeps. Just depends on what mood it is in. lol

 

[MorrisonHiker]

We have the same problem on new 12/2016 and 3/2017 Teslas in our garage. Neither will stay connected to the router or the wifi extender located in garage. Even though the wifi networks show full signal, they disconnect after a few seconds and revert to LTE with only one bar. If I set up a wifi hotspot on a phone, both will connect to that network and stay connected. I've tried making every possible change on the router and extender and nothing has fixed the issue. At one time, I thought it was working but it turns out the cars were connecting to the cellphone which was at the other end of the house, not the extender 3 feet from the car or the router 6 feet from the car. All other devices I try in the garage work perfectly.

I'm going to try Orbi next week. If that doesn't work, I'll contact the Service Center.

 

[jdjeff88]

Exactly my issue. One bar of LTE followed by 5 bars of sweet, sweet wifi, quickly followed by one bar of LTE. Just so you know, I started with Orbi. It is fantastic for everything and worked for 4 months with the Tesla too until everything went south. Now no router/wifi solution seems to work. I'm wondering perhaps if the signal isn't too strong. I'm going to try moving the closest Orbi sat farther away and try to re-connect and see if that helps.

 

[boonedocks]

Are you guys IN your car watching the screen while testing the Wi-Fi / LTE issues? Just wondering because if I enter my car it will disconnect from my Wi-Fi and go straight to LTE without fail. If I leave my car and check it on my network it sits solidly at 54Mbs and anywhere from -30 to -60 dB nonstop. If I open a door it will disconnect and convert to LTE without fail.

 

[xyeahtony]

This is not my experience at all. Granted in my garage with a router 50 feet away (and like 7 walls in between it) the 5ghz band doesn't work but my 2.4 band still catches the signal and performs well. Either you have a defective wifi receiver or your router/setup is not ideal.