Xfinity WiFi

[Jdsmooth]

I am picking up my inventory Model X 75D 5 seater (PUP, EAP, Cold Weather) on Monday. I have spent the last two weeks reading as many threads as I can to get up to speed on the car and it's issues and benefits.

I thought of a question I have not seen as I've read through the forums.

I live in an area widely covered with Xfinity WiFi and am a customer who gets "free" access to that network. Do I put my credentials for that network into the X, or will the constant dropping and picking up new access points as I drive cause issues (like streaming radio to fail, etc).

The benefit is that the car will be on wifi while parked at work, but are the risks not worth the reward?

Is the car smart enough to not attempt to use wifi while driving?

Thanks.

 

[matblk]

In my experience, the WiFi reception on the X requires a strong signal to connect. If I park more than a car's length (20 ft / 6 m) away from the base station, my X won't bother connecting to the WiFi.

Even when connected to WiFi, logs on my home network show that my X will choose to download updates over the cellular network. In the 10 months I've owned my X, only 1 update was downloaded over WiFi. My X does happily push daily data dumps to Tesla over WiFi but these are small in size compared to a software update.

Tesla's can use WiFi while driving. A number of people install WiFi hotspots in there vehicles.

 

[SabrToothSqrl]

Don't bother with the Xfinity thing. seriously. set it up at your house on your real wifi. End of setup.

 

[retinaguy]

Also in age of hacking, being on a public network is not ideal.

 

[chillaban]

The car will not join any wireless networks automatically when it's in Drive. Only when it's in Park. You can manually join a network while in DRive, but note that shifting away from Park immediately disconnects your car from wifi since 8.0 (IMO a welcome change, for exactly the reason you worry about).


Other notes:

- You can hook up your Tesla to xfinitywifi. You'd need a computer that can change its MAC address, join xfinitywifi using your car's MAC address and authenticate to xfinitywifi, then revert your machine to its regular MAC. Then from this point forward, your car will successfully join xfinitywifi.
- Don't worry about public wifi; all the sensitive control channels are via an OpenVPN UDP SSL VPN.
- Teslas will refuse to join a network if it can't establish the VPN connection right away. In other words: It can't get through a captive portal login screen on its own, hence the MAC spoofing workaround.

 

[verygreen]

- Teslas will refuse to join a network if it can't establish the VPN connection right away. In other words: It can't get through a captive portal login screen on its own, hence the MAC spoofing workaround.

I would not be so sure about this one.
The "are we on internet" logic is pretty weak, it basically checks three hosts from 10 or so predefined sites assuming teslamotors.com is not accessible.

# SYNOPSIS
#    check-internet
#
# DESCRIPTION
#    Test if the internet is accessible by attempting to download the web page
#    header from teslamotors.com. If teslamotors.com is not accessible, try
#    up to three popular websites chosen at random

...

WEBSITES="google facebook youtube yahoo wikipedia amazon ebay live twitter blogspot \
twitter linkedin go bing pinterest msn espn walmart aol tumblr \
paypal huffingtonpost netflix cnn apple nvidia bankofamerica wordpress wsj chase \
imdb target nytimes microsoft wellsfargo about weather avg adobe etsy"

This is to say that legitimate xfinity portal would be a stumbling block, rogue xfinity accesspoint could still trick the car into thinking it's on internet when it's not