Wifi issues

[Galinette]

Dear all,

I have a brand new model S. My garage being underground with a poor cellular level, I have set up a TP-Link CPL Wifi access point in the garage, in order to have a good connection to the app when the car is there.
The wifi It works flawlessly with phones & an iPad, all bars are there, as it should for an access point located inside the room.
But, the car barely catches any signal. I managed to connect once, and it lasted barely one minute. Most of the time don't even see the network name listed.

Do I have a faulty antenna that I should ask for repair?

Thanks!

 

[trace]

I'm not sure on the faulty antenna but it's possible it is very directional. Have you tried turning your car around (eg: parking backwards)?

 

[MorrisonHiker]

What firmware are you on? Our cars had WiFi issues due to Wink and DLNA for over a year. The WiFi would constantly connect and disconnect. They finally fixed something in 2018.10.4 or so and now our cars don't have any problem with WiFi.

 

[bmah]

What firmware are you on? Our cars had WiFi issues due to Wink and DLNA for over a year. The WiFi would constantly connect and disconnect. They finally fixed something in 2018.10.4 or so and now our cars don't have any problem with WiFi.

How’s that? They fixed that problem and you didn’t change anything on your network? If they improved compatibility with other devices on WiFi networks that’s definitely a significant (positive) change.

(Never experienced this problem personally, but if they really fixed it, I’d be pleasantly surprised.)

Bruce.

PS. OP, on American Tesla’s, the WiFi antenna is in the right (passenger side) side mirror housing. This can lead to less than optimal wireless performance if your WiFi access point is on the opposite side of the car. Not sure how the directionality works out in other markets (France, right?). So I’d echo a previous poster’s suggestion to try again with your car facing the other direction.

 

[Mediocrates]

I've noticed that the auto-folding of the mirrors also notably affects the signal strength.

 

[jdjeff88]

What firmware are you on? Our cars had WiFi issues due to Wink and DLNA for over a year. The WiFi would constantly connect and disconnect. They finally fixed something in 2018.10.4 or so and now our cars don't have any problem with WiFi.

Are you positive it was a Tesla fw update and not a router update? I’ve been hearing forever that "the next" Orbi update has fixed or would fix the wink/DLNA issue but it never did so I had to set up a dedicated/isolated network just for the car. Would be great to think that this is no longer required.

 

[.jg.]

Dear all,

I have a brand new model S. My garage being underground with a poor cellular level, I have set up a TP-Link CPL Wifi access point in the garage, in order to have a good connection to the app when the car is there.
The wifi It works flawlessly with phones & an iPad, all bars are there, as it should for an access point located inside the room.
But, the car barely catches any signal. I managed to connect once, and it lasted barely one minute. Most of the time don't even see the network name listed.

Do I have a faulty antenna that I should ask for repair?

Thanks!

I think "CPL" is termed "powerline" in the UK and USA. You could try setting up a hotspot on your phone or ipad and see if the Tesla can connect to that, at different distances. (Obviously, any hotspot experiment would have to be where there is cellular signal). If the car still has difficulty, perhaps that would indicate some sort of issue with the antenna or wifi module on the car.

 

[Galinette]

Thanks for your replies. By the time, I have tried to connect to an iphone in hotspot mode, and placed 50cm away from the passenger mirror, and still a super weak signal. So this confirmed poor reception by the car.
I know the DLNA may cause deconnection issues, but the DLNA cannot be in cause when you are not connected yet to a hotspot and just measuring the signal level. DLNA or any protocol used in your home network cannot cause the wifi signal to become weaker.

Then I did a soft-reboot of the MCU, and tried again today. And guess what : perfect signal in the garage, the car automatically reconnects when approaching the door. I also know that the first unsuccessful try was with folded mirrors, so I'll give this a try, but it seems that rebooting fixed something.

Now I can summon the car properly in the garage

 

[Galinette]

Not sure how the directionality works out in other markets (France, right?)

How did you figure out

 

[bmah]

How did you figure out

I put your location in "Nantes" into a search engine and the first hit that came up was a city in France.

Glad you got things working. Fortunately or unfortunately there are quite a few annoying problems with Teslas that can be fixed by a reboot as you just found out.

Bruce.

 

[MorrisonHiker]

How’s that? They fixed that problem and you didn’t change anything on your network? If they improved compatibility with other devices on WiFi networks that’s definitely a significant (positive) change.

Are you positive it was a Tesla fw update and not a router update? I’ve been hearing forever that "the next" Orbi update has fixed or would fix the wink/DLNA issue but it never did so I had to set up a dedicated/isolated network just for the car. Would be great to think that this is no longer required.

I suppose a router update could've fixed it. I had a ticket open with Wink for many months and none of their updates ever fixed anything. I could prove it was Wink causing my problem as within a minute of me unplugging the Wink hub, the car would connect to WiFi and stay connected. Within a minute of plugging Wink back in, the cars would all cycle repeatedly between WiFi and LTE.

I noticed the WiFi issue went away around the time we got the 2018.10.4 update and assumed that's what fixed it, but it could've been an Orbi update. I only have the one router/satellite. I did have a different router before the Orbi and the cars had the same problem until I set up a guest network and only put the cars on the guest network. When then tried a similar setup when we got Orbi but it seemed Orbi's guest network wasn't a truly separate network and the Wink hub on the regular network still caused the issue.

I'll try putting the cars back on the same network as the Wink hub. If the problem returns then it could've been a router update that fixed the guest network functionality, truly separating it from the regular WiFi network.

 

[MorrisonHiker]

I may have spoken too soon...or perhaps the latest update broke things. I got the 2018.14.2 update and when sitting in the car testing the browser, I noticed it was once again cycling between LTE and WIFI every minute.