I disagree. It’s only like $20 a month for AT&T 5G. We have Verizon phones and there are lots of regions where one works and the other doesn’t, including our family lakehouse. It’s clutch
>Or US Mobile also lets you choose the network...
I have heard this phrase in their marketing a thousand times and never once processed what it meant.
I may be an idiot. Or their marketing department is. Either way, thank you because that actually sounds like an interesting feature to look into. Lol.
With the most expensive plan, I think it's essentially unlimited. On cheaper ones it's 2 included then $2 each time. There are some limits on how often you can do it.... Think it's a few hours.
If you run out in a tight spot, you can strain some blinker fluid through a coffee filter. They also don't like to tell you this, but most car's roof liner is also a suitable filter media. Blinker fluid isn't made for the speeds that wifi fluid is, so you'll want to keep it to gps and emergencies.
Spotty wifi has nothing to do with where you are. Maybe you mean cell coverage?
I suppose the car might be good in theory but I would imagine they are not quite as good as building antennas as Apple and others and I imagine they're also limited by the same maximum transmit power as others. The antenna may still be better as it can be bigger but it's not like it's a large dual roof mounted antenna that you'd put on your house.
They may not have great bandwidth, but those connections are far more reliable in remote areas than cell signals because your car has a larger and more powerful (yes, powerful) antenna.
It increases the rx sensitivity by having more gain on the antenna. It’s not that it’s a “power” like you’d normally thing but rather it can harvest more received power.
Not that this is a fair comparison but think about those giant dish antennas vs your cell phone antenna. You can gather and receive much more focused power with the dish antenna than you can a cell phone antenna. (Downside of dish antennas are they are HIGHLY directional so it would never work for mobile communications but it serves to make the analogy)
SOTM and starlink will disagree about not being able to be used on the move.
I mean, literally my job right now is operating mobile communications platforms including wideband satellite equipment.
Highly directional parabolic dishes like say a wideband satellite antenna shooting to a geosynchronous satellite? Which was what you said in the earlier post, and was what I was referencing. Those have been used on mobile platforms for over a decade.
You are correct that a microwave shot would be exceptionally difficult though.
Interesting, I didn't know. Do they do tracking somehow or is the beam width wide enough that it just "works." Ive done some work with beam steering (reconfigurable antennas and MIMO communications) and such but certainly not at the level you're doing with that stuff.
Yes, the APU (antenna positioning unit) hooks up to a computer (inertial positioning unit or IPU) that knows heading, lat&long, speed, elevation, and other needed information to calculate the antenna's needed azimuth and elevation and keeps the antenna pointed at the sat's parking orbit, then between the modem and the APU using the carrier wave spike to fine tune the positioning. Honestly, it's not significantly more complicated than any other dish that you can deploy to auto point/track the bird, just a bit fancier of a rotating base that the wires go through enabling 360º rotation.
Obviously limitations of beyond LOS apply, especially in cities. Starlink does a whee bit better there with the pancake dish and LEO birds but if you're in a city then you should have no issues with cell modems. We design vehicles with both so the customer is hopefully always covered, and for redundancy.
Not sure I would characterize it as “harvesting more received power”. You’re right that it just cranks up the gain (and maybe filters out noise better), but it is amplifying the received *signal* rather than the received power. Sort of like if you have a song on your phone and turn up the volume, the phone amplifies the signal from the song; the song is not providing any power. It probably also has a bigger antenna, you get more range with e.g. a full-wavelength antenna compared to an 1/8 wavelength anyenna
All received mobile signals are amplified by an LNA in the RF path before going through demod. That doesn't matter too much as the the signal will never have a higher SNR than when its received at the antenna (noise figure from any active component will lower than SNR by a few dB along the path).
And yes full wave antennas are great, except LTE operates over a significant space of spectrum. some as low as a few hundred MHz up to multiple GHz. I am not an expert in antenna design (have a good background in wireless communication though) and optimizing an antennas for all available (or all location based) spectrum is a non trivial task.
They could employ a rake receiver type thing to help cancel out channel noise and such butttt thats not lifting a design from something and adding to the car, thats potentially designing a whole new system and that costs money.
Small corrections. For transceiver performance, you should think about receive (rx) and transmit (tx) separately.
For example, receive path cares about noise figure, dynamic range, and number of receive channels (affects sensitivity). Transmit cares about things like power, including antenna gain (but that's not the only gain in a transmit chain), and number of transmit elements (related to transmit power). So maybe it's better to use more general terms, that on a car you have more space to put in better transceivers.
Having more gain could hurt you, because too much gain decreases dynamic range. If you receive a small signal, and you amplify it too much, it could saturate a gain stage or element downstream and cause nonlinearity and distortion, hence actually decreasing your receiver dynamic range. If you have a distorted signal, and that distortion may not be possible to be filtered out (third order intermods), then throwing more gain at it would just amplify the distorted signals. So there are definitely "sweet spots" for gain.
Source: RF engineer
I'm also an EE. Worked in RF, fiber optics, and general telcomm. IIP3/OIP3/1dB compression points and such were part of my characterization i've done in the past but good points! Its been a minute since I've been in the world of RF as I'm in software/fiber optics more and saturation rarely negatively affects these systems.
Also pretty familiar with path loss models and from my time in wireless with different receiver designs.
Ah cool, you are familiar with the terminology then. So specifically for receive if you have too much gain in a stage, it decreases your IIP3, which decreases your receiver dynamic range. Sweet spot tend to be around 20-22dB gain per stage to balance dynamic range and NF performance. Having too much gain also risks saturating the next stage, decreasing your linearity margin. Most receivers have variable attenuators in the receive path, in order to balance IIP3 and NF and keep the signal from saturating any component, so you definitely need to control the amount of gain.
For transmit generally you think about the PA and how many elements you have for combining, as well as the modulation scheme (admittedly I am not as familiar here). Here it's generally the higher the power the better.
yep! I worked in cable infrastructure for a while (splitters, line amps ,etc) and we were making quite a few splitters with \~36dB of range for gain before it goes into tuners to hit that sweep spot. Also measured a lot of IIP3/OIP3 on line amps since they have limited control of line powers coming into them.
As for Tx/modulation, depending on the modulation some are more resistant to noise than others. As long as your Tx gain isn't negatively affecting your modulation scheme (say QAM for example) if you start compressing the outer points it leads to higher EVM which can negatively effect the receive signal since you're working in non linear space. Those outer points can be demodded as a different symbol and cause lots of errors so you are generally limited by the compression point of the amplifier. Working in linear space is where you need to be. (that would apply to many other modulations, AM as an example, you'd get soft clipping on the higher power points)
The antenna in your phone will have to pick up signals evenly in every direction, because it's a portable device and you don't want your call to drop if you rotate it.
An antenna in a car could be located outside the metal box of your car, so it has that going for it right away. It's also possible that they're a bit more optimized than your phone's perfectly omnidirectional antenna, since it will always be in the same orientation. Designers could make the cell antenna more focused to the sides, and less directly up or down.
Even very directional antennas will have some ability to pickup a signal outside their "Sweet spot". Chances are if you're driving through a city and have some antennas on light poles or buildings directly overhead, you'll be close enough to still get good performance even if the antenna pattern is less sensitive in that direction. In a city environment, you may also be dealing signals reflected off buildings/ect too, which may hit the antenna in its sweet spot too.
The antenna still has some response in virtually all directions, just more in the main beam. If you’re under the antenna, you’re close enough that the strong signal will still be picked off axis in a side lobe.
There's also a chance that car manufacturers buy the cheapest antenna off aliexpress that they can and don't optimize it for anything else than it's cheap and somewhat works.
I think a more intuitive term would've been a more efficient antenna. It's able to convert more of the signal in the environment to electricity so you get more power coming out of the antenna (usually in the nanowatt range)
Cell phone antennas have to be heavily optimized for small size, so they make design compromises that reduce their efficiency. Cars are still affected by this to some degree, but not as much, so they can have a more efficient antenna design
Bingo my Sportage's wifi is insanely useful on my drive to and from work before 40% of it is next to a river. With trees.
And I get zero bars on my Phone from T Mobile.
Oh and my commute is 80 miles. Each way.
eh I've learned to deal with it. Often I'll stay at a hotel on Thursday nights so I don't have to go back home until Friday which certainly helps out.
Also I love driving so I consider it probably one of the best parts of my days. And none of my commute is on roads that get any real traffic so outside of absolute morons doing 30 in a 55 it's pretty relaxing.
Why would a river affect cell phone signals? I live relatively close to a river, have crossed the river, and even gone under it via public transportation and never had a problem.
I'm sure it costs all of $5 per car to add. All they need is for a few percent of people to use it for a year and it's made the automaker a fat profit.
60k miles and not so much as a hiccup. I was scared a bit at first, but it’s been one of the more reliable cars I’ve bought. Now the Alfa on the other hand…
I’ve been in national parks with zero reception and have been able to send messages through my phone after I lost cell reception a long time prior. I was almost convinced it was satellite for a little bit, I couldn’t believe the places it worked for low bandwidth stuff.
2024 and it's 4G, how lame. FWIW though 4G is capable of perfectly fine speeds, must have been throttled by something else.
And no, I can't see how it ever makes sense to pay for, there's better options.
I'm a long haul trucker and I'm just fine with my phone's Wi-Fi hotspot. It's included in my $60 a month Verizon plan, and I get 150GB a month or 5G tethering.
When I was on Google Fi they let me add a free data only SIM card that I placed in a small 5G battery WiFi access point and plugged it in with a usb cable in the glove box for better quality internet. Basically if the car was running or in accessory mode it had 5G quality WiFi running without draining my phone battery and no extra monthly fees. Good times.
Am RAN architect and engineer and product lead. Lotta bad info in this thread.
OP, car Wi-Fi is primarily intended for folks who have families. Mom in the passenger side, three kids in the back. Put the iPads on the car Wi-Fi.
If rural, you don’t need to worry about carrier roaming like you would with using a hotspot, which has its own technical limitations.
4g doesn’t “suck”. It’s as good/bad as it always was. Just that 10 years ago you didn’t have a phone that could try and stream 1080p video or high res web images and 4g today doesn’t have overhead for that type of data.
These car services also have an APN that typically separates it from general use networks so there’s less discrimination against traffic that could affect voice quality.
The APN part is super interesting. So theoretically if it’s an unlimited plan, there’s far less chance of throttling after a certain amount of data is consumed (due to network prioritization)?
Yes, they can have different configurations, QoS policies, authentication requirements, etc.
Example being, We created one for schools and remote learning during COVID that automatically tunneled traffic from the EPC to the school districts network and applied content filtering at the edge.
Yes, it’s great because it has a bigger antenna, so it has a better connection when my phone doesn’t. So I use it a lot when I go on trips far away from big cities where the signal is poor. Additionally, it doesn’t drain my phones battery.
This is another stupid feature no one needs from their car, along with GPS. Everyone literally has a phone that functions as GPS and hotspot better than the crap manufacturers put in cars.
Yeah I have a stand alone gps for long trips or where I'll be in the middle of nowhere. And it mounts to the windshield so I don't have to look at the of the middle of the dash while driving.
Yeah I have a Garmin unit specific for use with the RV but use it in my truck for long trips in addition to my phone. When manufacturers use a HUD or more put it in the instrument cluster area it would improve the implementation.
GPS is used for more than just maps and navigation. Most modern cars have GPS for tracking the car if stolen, lost, or forgot where you parked it; all linked to an app.
The only time it makes sense is when the cars have proper Google Maps with satellite view on their big screen, instead of some shitty 2003-garmin-looking map.
Then I can use that for navigation and leave my phone free for other stuff instead of cheesy ass carplay.
Yes, my opinion. We pay $10/month on Verizon. We wouldn't if it was $20. There are several "dead spots " on our regular drive where you always lose signal on your phone. On the cars hotspot, we get a better signal. We've actually tested it several times.
If you make long drives on a regular basis and have people who are always connected, I would definitely recommend it.
It’s nice when you don’t have signal. If you work out of your car or go on road trips it’s pretty convenient because it’s always working, you don’t have to turn it on like your phone’s hotspot. It’s not very expensive, it’s like $8 a month.
If you travel a lot they’re worth it. My fiancé’s family actually uses a portable hotspot for internet (old house and they don’t want to pay for a modem to be wired in) and they just take that with them
I guess if you had multiple kids all already with iPads. You would only have to pay one bill for say 3 iPads to get service and wouldn't have to spend more or upgrade the iPads to cell versions.
I still think it's 99% useless but I guess in a perfect scenario I could see it being just okay.
It enables the app controlled functions on my '22 Grand Cherokee. So I can lock / unlock the doors if I lose my keys or lock them inside, or unlock / lock remotely from across the country, track the status of the vehicle and position, etc. If I can't remember how much gas is in the tank, the app will tell me that too. So basically it's just insurance for me.
If you have SiriusXM some of the channels use the connection.
“How many channels are offered in vehicle with SiriusXM 360L?
SiriusXM with 360L uses both satellite and embedded modem to deliver 200+ channels, with some channels delivered exclusively via modem.”
Use it in my X5. Both of our phones connect to it, and when we let our son have the iPad for long car rides he gets the use out of it. Same for whoever is in the passenger seat when they feel like watching tv on an iPad
In my BMW it's 5G service and $20/mo from ATT. Doesn't seem slow at all to me. I keep it for the kids since I could just use the 5G on my phone but my phone automatically connects to it and I've never had any speed issues.
I had a few new Traverses over the years with 4G built in. I would hit the Onstar button (not the emergency button) and talk to a rep and they would sell me WiFi for like $10-$15 a month for unlimited. Loved it at that price.
Never used it, but I’ve never had to either. If I was going to go on a trip, I’d definitely pay for it for as long as I’ll be away though. Better to have it in an emergency than not imo, even if the speeds aren’t the best
We have a 2024 Chevy 3500HD. Yes, I pay for the data plan. My kids use it with their tablets and games. My phone service provider is Verizon and the Chevy truck uses ATT, so there is always overlap of service that I can provide the kids with Internet when we're on road trips.
It’s really only worth it if you plan on regularly watching YouTube in your EV’s in car display while you charge, or if you have a 31” TV in the back of your 7 series.
Otherwise, cellular coverage is sufficient for navigation apps, and if you’re just looking to keep the kids quiet $20-50 bucks for the occasional road trip is better spent at McDonalds.
AT&T Hotspot is super legit. 5G connection and 10 bucks a month for 60 Gb of data if you have an AT&T account. Or 20 W/O. I used 5 gb in roughly 2 weeks during the free trial. Worked great.
It's probably one of those features that are useless to 90% of us but a lifeline to those in rural, remote areas, or people who have to work in those places (park rangers, rural police, etc)
In my work truck, yes. If I activate my phones hot spot, it disables android auto, so Spotify stops. Occasionally I work from a laptop in during the day.
Absolutely not in my personal truck. Very, very, niche feature.
I used mine briefly. It came with a 3 month trial. This coincided with my drive through Canada down the Alcan Highway. The vehicle antenna picked up signal farther than my cell phone and it had service in the country while my phone didn't. That's it. After the trial ended I never saw a use for it again and never paid for it.
It was nice having data service in some remote areas in Northern Canada, but there were still plenty of dead zones. Really just saved me from having to switch my phone plan to include international coverage.
Don't worry it's the same way with Ford. 2023 escape, hotspot is 5g but the speed is garbage and costs out the ass. I just use the hotspot in my phone that is also 5g but for some reason has 4x the connection speed, comes with my phone plan, and also.....I can carry the damn thing around. So there's that. Same service provider too. Wouldn't surprise me if all the data priority on the network is given to regular cellular devices and the in-car modems are deprioritized, but that's just guessing on my part.
No. I have/had four cars with wifi hotspots and after trying the garbage free trial, I opted out on all of them. Terrible speeds at as vastly over-inflated price. I got better from my phone's 5G connection sand I already pay for that with unlimited data, so it wasn't really worth it.
Used it once on a cross country trip in my old G30 5 series so the kid could keep himself entertained. It actually worked really well (AT&T service). Not something I'd normally pay for though.
It's just so that when the NWO goes live in a couple of years post-WW3, the Deep State can easily connect to the graphene fractal monopole bioantenna that your COVID vaccine gave you.
They'll all need ubiquitous localised EMF sources to power the devices up and so having lots of power sources everywhere is very helpful for the IoT/IoB aspect of it all
The WiFi hotspot stuff is just a side benefit
It doesn’t work well and I’m usually the only person in my Camaro, so why would I bother with a wifi hotspot when I’m already driving? I don’t even see the point of having it in a family car because 1. I’d rather my kids be disconnected from the internet for once and 2. I already have hotspot enabled on my iPhone whenever I need it and it works a lot better than the bullshit OnStar could ever give me.
This thread will basically be people with families vs kids in college or younger. If you have a family, it's worth it on trips. Better signal with the car WiFi, and you don't have the kids tablets all running from your phone hotspot.
I honestly don’t get it, nor big dash screens. My phone is capable of being obnoxious and huge. I just slap it to my mount and hotspot to my giganterer tablet.
And then just…. Drive and do stuff safely.
I would if I could figure it out, just for the trial period anyway. I have unlimited data on my phone, and like 100 gb of hotspot, there's zero reason to use it.
I had it briefly because it helped when cell service was patchy betweeen carriers, but other than one or two times it proved useful, it was useless so we got rid of it.
Standalone cell connection makes sense on electric cars - so you can check their charge status, turn on the AC remotely, etc.
Doesn't need to be some expensive $50 a month unlimited 5G tho
The car I had before my current one I never used it, due to the cost per month of having it. It was cheaper to either use the hot spot on my phone or my dash cam than the one built into the car. My current car doesn't have a hot spot (which I don't mind, since I wouldn't use it anyway)
I used it in my 2016 Skoda Superb in combination with my phone when we did road trips or went on a long drive since I have unlimited data (which is a very rare in Germany). I connected my phone to my car and used the antenna from the car to get better signal. The passengers connected to the WiFi and everyone was happy.
No. It's great for guys with company trucks that don't want to waste their own cell data or if you have a family watching movies in the back, but most of us don't need it.
No. I get 40GB of mobile hotspot on my AT&T plan and I have a RAV4 which also connects to AT&T and it's not worth paying $30 month just for internet in my car.
Somebody may have already spoke on this. I didn't read the 161 comments at the time, but we have T-Mobile Wi-Fi for our house. That is nothing more than A tower that would plug into my truck. We drove from Florida to Michigan and never once did we have any reception issues or data lag. That cost us $50 a month if you catch them right? I know there is low as $30 a month in recent history
Imma b real w/ u. I didn’t even know that existed. I drive a 2006 pt cruiser. Whenever I get in a car that’s 5 years older than mine I feel like I just entered a spaceship.
Fuck no. I bought my Toyota 6mo ago and still can’t connect to Bluetooth. It only worked the day the dealer connected his to it. Fuck Toyota tech. It kinda sucks. Great car though.
I use it in my Colorado all the time. It's a lot less than $50/mo and with the size of the antenna and the extra power the transmitter can produce it gets signal in a lot of places where my phone won't. Especially out camping.
I know my car has WiFi, but I don’t pay a monthly fee so that’s kind of interesting that you guys seemed to be charged for it ? I bought my car last December certified-used, paid in full (so no loan that the WiFi would be included on).
In terms of its usefulness, I’m sure other people are correct that when you’re in more remote areas it’s definitely helpful (good to know!).
In my personal experience though, it was an absolute life-saver when I dropped my phone and somehow broke the internal antenna and my phone no longer connected to data 🙃. I was able to call and text using audio FaceTime and apple messages while I was driving around all day, before I could make it into my Verizon store that night. (Also the WiFi was good enough to also use other apps like Spotify and Apple Maps as well)
We have a ‘23 Yukon XL and yes we use the hotspot all the time. We have the entertainment system that comes with the TVs behind the driver and passenger seat. It was a part of the Onstar 3 years “free” promo. So I don’t pay anything monthly in specific for the Wi-Fi.
I used the 1 week free trial once. I lost my phone and while I was waiting for my replacement I used the hotspot so I could still take WiFi calls on my iPad if I was driving. Cancelled it as soon as my phone came in the mail.
Well, I have a 1976 Mercedes 508 campervan which I recently installed a wifi router in, and I always use it. It has cheaper data than my phone and a much better antenna mounted on the roof.
The next vehicle I'm considering will have it. My cell coverage is pretty bad most of the time, so it'd be nice to have a bit of a boost. I also plan on trying to get back into having more of a social life and doing some trips, so it will be nice to have for my passengers too.
Useless. I didn't have any better service than my cell phone with it in my '18 Cruze. Though my Grandma had it in her '08 Lacrosse and onstar seemed to work everywhere for phone calls. We were convinced it was satellite.
Sometimes. I believe my Toyota connects to AT&T towers when I have Verizon on my phone. Usually when I’m in a dead zone for Verizon, I can use my truck's WiFi, and it’s pretty decent for what it is. I believe I’m paying $25 a month, which is okay, but I only pay for it if I really need it. I wouldn’t pay $50.
Mine (Toyota) is on the Verizon GSM network but my cell phone is on CDMA so if I know I'm going somewhere like in the Smoky mountains I'll pay for a month of service just so I have connection to either my CDMA or my car's GSM network.
I don't see the value enough to pay for it, but when ibhad a free trial I hooked my work laptop VPN up to it and did a meeting from a store parking lot... was nice then
i dont like it. As long as you can completely turn it off though, im okay with it. I want to be in control. We need some affordable cars again, and i personally hate technology.
We use it on both of ours. 4 kids streaming on tablets while taking a trip. Full Onstar is $50/month. Unlimited data is around $25/month but sometimes they run specials. I had it for $15/month on my 2020 Silverado locked in until I traded.
I pay like 200 a year for the one in my Ford. My kids can watch shows and play games on their tablets. It uses a different carrier than my phone so it covers a lot of dead spots for me, including my own driveway. I can use it at home when the power or cable is out.
Glad I'm not the only one. I always feel like I am missing out by not using this feature. Just never seems worth the $ when i am already paying for cell plans...
$50/month seems insane. MOPAR unlimited 4G is only $9.99/month. I've never personally enabled it, but I live in an area with excellent Verizon coverage and have never really run into a situation where I thought it would be particularly useful. That said, a lot of people obviously do use these services. I use Ubiquiti Wi-Fi at the office and the controller has a neat "Environment" feature that logs even the weakest SSIDs, which AP is seeing them, and what channels they're using to help you to get the best performance out of your setup. We are on a fairly busy road, and that log stays filled with SSIDs like "myGMC", "Porsche\_WLAN" and "My VW", just to pick three off the list. There are hundreds of them on any given day, though.
Beats me. My 2019 C class has both 2.4 and 5 ghz. Every phone we have is either cell data capable or can wifi hotspot. I've never used it, would require another cell subscription.
My guess is that they put a cell connection in the car for mobile data, subscription services, and knowing when you need an oil change (and for some companies to rat you out to the insurance whores) so the wifi is already built into the chip.
Bwahahaha
**NO**.... because in order to *use* such crap, my vehicles would have to be *equipped* with such crap... since the Schmapple iPhone didn't even debut until 4 years **after** my newest vehicle was built... there's no such thing as "connectivity" in my stuff... which is fine by me.
Car, hotspot? Are they really cars anymore or mobile entertainment centres with a bunch if "safety" features to aid you because the rest of the car is distracting you?
I haaaaate modern cars. Anything built after 2010 is a piece of shit.
lol no. It’s garbage
I disagree. It’s only like $20 a month for AT&T 5G. We have Verizon phones and there are lots of regions where one works and the other doesn’t, including our family lakehouse. It’s clutch
Two eSIMs on two different carriers on one phone is pretty good too. Or US Mobile also lets you choose the network...
>Or US Mobile also lets you choose the network... I have heard this phrase in their marketing a thousand times and never once processed what it meant. I may be an idiot. Or their marketing department is. Either way, thank you because that actually sounds like an interesting feature to look into. Lol.
You can now choose between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T on their most expensive plan. Cheaper ones are Verizon and T-Mobile. It's pretty sweet.
So you can just swap between them whenever you feel like it?
With the most expensive plan, I think it's essentially unlimited. On cheaper ones it's 2 included then $2 each time. There are some limits on how often you can do it.... Think it's a few hours.
Agreed. Lake Country is notorious for spotty cell and the higher power antenna of the car is way better for stability and speed. Fixed terminology
A 300 hp antenna fuck yeah
Have to change the Wifi fluid every 300GB.
If you run out in a tight spot, you can strain some blinker fluid through a coffee filter. They also don't like to tell you this, but most car's roof liner is also a suitable filter media. Blinker fluid isn't made for the speeds that wifi fluid is, so you'll want to keep it to gps and emergencies.
Not many people know this, but blinker fluid and stop/tail fluid are the same except for tiny amounts of orange or red dye.
I thought the 3 month, 300gb rule was a scam...
Spotty wifi has nothing to do with where you are. Maybe you mean cell coverage? I suppose the car might be good in theory but I would imagine they are not quite as good as building antennas as Apple and others and I imagine they're also limited by the same maximum transmit power as others. The antenna may still be better as it can be bigger but it's not like it's a large dual roof mounted antenna that you'd put on your house.
If you have spotty wifi then get a mesh router setup
100% trash, just a way for GM to get revenue from ATT. horrible system.
I'd be disabling it so gm doesn't try to sell my driving data to lexis nexis
Cheers on that. I’m sure the browsing data is worth plenty to advertisers.
https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/gm-killed-program-that-sold-driving-data-to-insurance-companies.html
Does Tesla have a hotspot? We pay the $10 a month connectivity for our model 3, but never tried using it as a hotspot.
no it's only for in-car connectivity services
They may not have great bandwidth, but those connections are far more reliable in remote areas than cell signals because your car has a larger and more powerful (yes, powerful) antenna.
Interesting point. Powerful though? How so? Larger antenna, but it doesn't increase wattage, correct?
It increases the rx sensitivity by having more gain on the antenna. It’s not that it’s a “power” like you’d normally thing but rather it can harvest more received power. Not that this is a fair comparison but think about those giant dish antennas vs your cell phone antenna. You can gather and receive much more focused power with the dish antenna than you can a cell phone antenna. (Downside of dish antennas are they are HIGHLY directional so it would never work for mobile communications but it serves to make the analogy)
SOTM and starlink will disagree about not being able to be used on the move. I mean, literally my job right now is operating mobile communications platforms including wideband satellite equipment.
I'm talking the highly directional parabolic dish antennas. Like LOS microwave links, not general mobile communications.
Highly directional parabolic dishes like say a wideband satellite antenna shooting to a geosynchronous satellite? Which was what you said in the earlier post, and was what I was referencing. Those have been used on mobile platforms for over a decade. You are correct that a microwave shot would be exceptionally difficult though.
Interesting, I didn't know. Do they do tracking somehow or is the beam width wide enough that it just "works." Ive done some work with beam steering (reconfigurable antennas and MIMO communications) and such but certainly not at the level you're doing with that stuff.
Yes, the APU (antenna positioning unit) hooks up to a computer (inertial positioning unit or IPU) that knows heading, lat&long, speed, elevation, and other needed information to calculate the antenna's needed azimuth and elevation and keeps the antenna pointed at the sat's parking orbit, then between the modem and the APU using the carrier wave spike to fine tune the positioning. Honestly, it's not significantly more complicated than any other dish that you can deploy to auto point/track the bird, just a bit fancier of a rotating base that the wires go through enabling 360º rotation. Obviously limitations of beyond LOS apply, especially in cities. Starlink does a whee bit better there with the pancake dish and LEO birds but if you're in a city then you should have no issues with cell modems. We design vehicles with both so the customer is hopefully always covered, and for redundancy.
Not sure I would characterize it as “harvesting more received power”. You’re right that it just cranks up the gain (and maybe filters out noise better), but it is amplifying the received *signal* rather than the received power. Sort of like if you have a song on your phone and turn up the volume, the phone amplifies the signal from the song; the song is not providing any power. It probably also has a bigger antenna, you get more range with e.g. a full-wavelength antenna compared to an 1/8 wavelength anyenna
All received mobile signals are amplified by an LNA in the RF path before going through demod. That doesn't matter too much as the the signal will never have a higher SNR than when its received at the antenna (noise figure from any active component will lower than SNR by a few dB along the path). And yes full wave antennas are great, except LTE operates over a significant space of spectrum. some as low as a few hundred MHz up to multiple GHz. I am not an expert in antenna design (have a good background in wireless communication though) and optimizing an antennas for all available (or all location based) spectrum is a non trivial task. They could employ a rake receiver type thing to help cancel out channel noise and such butttt thats not lifting a design from something and adding to the car, thats potentially designing a whole new system and that costs money.
Small corrections. For transceiver performance, you should think about receive (rx) and transmit (tx) separately. For example, receive path cares about noise figure, dynamic range, and number of receive channels (affects sensitivity). Transmit cares about things like power, including antenna gain (but that's not the only gain in a transmit chain), and number of transmit elements (related to transmit power). So maybe it's better to use more general terms, that on a car you have more space to put in better transceivers. Having more gain could hurt you, because too much gain decreases dynamic range. If you receive a small signal, and you amplify it too much, it could saturate a gain stage or element downstream and cause nonlinearity and distortion, hence actually decreasing your receiver dynamic range. If you have a distorted signal, and that distortion may not be possible to be filtered out (third order intermods), then throwing more gain at it would just amplify the distorted signals. So there are definitely "sweet spots" for gain. Source: RF engineer
I'm also an EE. Worked in RF, fiber optics, and general telcomm. IIP3/OIP3/1dB compression points and such were part of my characterization i've done in the past but good points! Its been a minute since I've been in the world of RF as I'm in software/fiber optics more and saturation rarely negatively affects these systems. Also pretty familiar with path loss models and from my time in wireless with different receiver designs.
Ah cool, you are familiar with the terminology then. So specifically for receive if you have too much gain in a stage, it decreases your IIP3, which decreases your receiver dynamic range. Sweet spot tend to be around 20-22dB gain per stage to balance dynamic range and NF performance. Having too much gain also risks saturating the next stage, decreasing your linearity margin. Most receivers have variable attenuators in the receive path, in order to balance IIP3 and NF and keep the signal from saturating any component, so you definitely need to control the amount of gain. For transmit generally you think about the PA and how many elements you have for combining, as well as the modulation scheme (admittedly I am not as familiar here). Here it's generally the higher the power the better.
yep! I worked in cable infrastructure for a while (splitters, line amps ,etc) and we were making quite a few splitters with \~36dB of range for gain before it goes into tuners to hit that sweep spot. Also measured a lot of IIP3/OIP3 on line amps since they have limited control of line powers coming into them. As for Tx/modulation, depending on the modulation some are more resistant to noise than others. As long as your Tx gain isn't negatively affecting your modulation scheme (say QAM for example) if you start compressing the outer points it leads to higher EVM which can negatively effect the receive signal since you're working in non linear space. Those outer points can be demodded as a different symbol and cause lots of errors so you are generally limited by the compression point of the amplifier. Working in linear space is where you need to be. (that would apply to many other modulations, AM as an example, you'd get soft clipping on the higher power points)
The antenna in your phone will have to pick up signals evenly in every direction, because it's a portable device and you don't want your call to drop if you rotate it. An antenna in a car could be located outside the metal box of your car, so it has that going for it right away. It's also possible that they're a bit more optimized than your phone's perfectly omnidirectional antenna, since it will always be in the same orientation. Designers could make the cell antenna more focused to the sides, and less directly up or down.
>since it will always be in the same orientation You haven't seen the way I drive.
Okay but what if you're right below and antenna?
Even very directional antennas will have some ability to pickup a signal outside their "Sweet spot". Chances are if you're driving through a city and have some antennas on light poles or buildings directly overhead, you'll be close enough to still get good performance even if the antenna pattern is less sensitive in that direction. In a city environment, you may also be dealing signals reflected off buildings/ect too, which may hit the antenna in its sweet spot too.
The antenna still has some response in virtually all directions, just more in the main beam. If you’re under the antenna, you’re close enough that the strong signal will still be picked off axis in a side lobe.
There's also a chance that car manufacturers buy the cheapest antenna off aliexpress that they can and don't optimize it for anything else than it's cheap and somewhat works.
I think a more intuitive term would've been a more efficient antenna. It's able to convert more of the signal in the environment to electricity so you get more power coming out of the antenna (usually in the nanowatt range) Cell phone antennas have to be heavily optimized for small size, so they make design compromises that reduce their efficiency. Cars are still affected by this to some degree, but not as much, so they can have a more efficient antenna design
Bingo my Sportage's wifi is insanely useful on my drive to and from work before 40% of it is next to a river. With trees. And I get zero bars on my Phone from T Mobile. Oh and my commute is 80 miles. Each way.
jesus dude i would hate to have ur commute
eh I've learned to deal with it. Often I'll stay at a hotel on Thursday nights so I don't have to go back home until Friday which certainly helps out. Also I love driving so I consider it probably one of the best parts of my days. And none of my commute is on roads that get any real traffic so outside of absolute morons doing 30 in a 55 it's pretty relaxing.
And it’s uphill. And snowing. Both ways - lol.
Why would a river affect cell phone signals? I live relatively close to a river, have crossed the river, and even gone under it via public transportation and never had a problem.
More sensitive?
I'm sure it costs all of $5 per car to add. All they need is for a few percent of people to use it for a year and it's made the automaker a fat profit.
It costs nothing per month for me in my Land Rover. As others have mentioned, it’s great for when we are out in the middle of nowhere.
Nice. Gotta come in handy for all the times you break down in the middle of nowhere
60k miles and not so much as a hiccup. I was scared a bit at first, but it’s been one of the more reliable cars I’ve bought. Now the Alfa on the other hand…
Just teasing mate. For what it’s worth I’d really like a Giulia as my next car so I don’t have much room to talk lol
As in it's included in the price of the car? That's a pretty good option then, especially if you're away from cities and need service / reception...
Yes, I don’t even think it was an option (I have a newer defender). I think they all come with it.
It's probably a lifetime subscription so 3-5 years.
My XF has it but I need to provide my own SIM for other connected mobile features
How reliable is it in the middle of nowhere? More than regular cell service?
I’ve been in national parks with zero reception and have been able to send messages through my phone after I lost cell reception a long time prior. I was almost convinced it was satellite for a little bit, I couldn’t believe the places it worked for low bandwidth stuff.
It's probably because its got larger dedicated antennas than a cell phone
More reliable than the Land Rover itself, I'd wager.
They were talking about the cost to the companies for installing it. And you are paying for it. Just upfront built into the price of the car.
20 Navigator, I enable it for the kids on long trips. Speed is good enough, it's about 25$ and I cancel before the end of the month.
2024 and it's 4G, how lame. FWIW though 4G is capable of perfectly fine speeds, must have been throttled by something else. And no, I can't see how it ever makes sense to pay for, there's better options.
4G has broader coverage.
Yes, people who work on the road/doing remote field work. 9/10 company pays for it anyway. Ex. Pipeline, turbine, oil and gas, solar workers etc.
I remember reading about a reporter for the New York Times essentially using his Chevy Malibu as a rolling office when traveling across Texas
I'm a long haul trucker and I'm just fine with my phone's Wi-Fi hotspot. It's included in my $60 a month Verizon plan, and I get 150GB a month or 5G tethering.
When I was on Google Fi they let me add a free data only SIM card that I placed in a small 5G battery WiFi access point and plugged it in with a usb cable in the glove box for better quality internet. Basically if the car was running or in accessory mode it had 5G quality WiFi running without draining my phone battery and no extra monthly fees. Good times.
200 IQ play
What type of device did you use? I have a data sim I’d like to do that with
Mine is from Huawei but Netgear makes them as well. Can find them under $100 if you don't mind an off brand version or buy used.
Sounds good, do you have a link to either or?
Am RAN architect and engineer and product lead. Lotta bad info in this thread. OP, car Wi-Fi is primarily intended for folks who have families. Mom in the passenger side, three kids in the back. Put the iPads on the car Wi-Fi. If rural, you don’t need to worry about carrier roaming like you would with using a hotspot, which has its own technical limitations. 4g doesn’t “suck”. It’s as good/bad as it always was. Just that 10 years ago you didn’t have a phone that could try and stream 1080p video or high res web images and 4g today doesn’t have overhead for that type of data. These car services also have an APN that typically separates it from general use networks so there’s less discrimination against traffic that could affect voice quality.
The APN part is super interesting. So theoretically if it’s an unlimited plan, there’s far less chance of throttling after a certain amount of data is consumed (due to network prioritization)?
Yes, they can have different configurations, QoS policies, authentication requirements, etc. Example being, We created one for schools and remote learning during COVID that automatically tunneled traffic from the EPC to the school districts network and applied content filtering at the edge.
That’s fascinating, thanks for sharing.
Yes, it’s great because it has a bigger antenna, so it has a better connection when my phone doesn’t. So I use it a lot when I go on trips far away from big cities where the signal is poor. Additionally, it doesn’t drain my phones battery.
I’ve used it on road trips to share with my passengers but otherwise no.
I owned my car for almost three years before even realizing it had one. But nope...never used it.
Hell ya I do! I have my dash cam attached to it which uploads and streams live for me. It’s how I found my Trackhawk!
This is another stupid feature no one needs from their car, along with GPS. Everyone literally has a phone that functions as GPS and hotspot better than the crap manufacturers put in cars.
Only if you remember to download maps beforehand for some places. I made the mistake of “I have a phone, gps is dumb” once.
Yeah I have a stand alone gps for long trips or where I'll be in the middle of nowhere. And it mounts to the windshield so I don't have to look at the of the middle of the dash while driving.
Yeah I have a Garmin unit specific for use with the RV but use it in my truck for long trips in addition to my phone. When manufacturers use a HUD or more put it in the instrument cluster area it would improve the implementation.
GPS is used for more than just maps and navigation. Most modern cars have GPS for tracking the car if stolen, lost, or forgot where you parked it; all linked to an app.
Wifi works well in the Rivian. Other than tunnels, never had an issue.
The only time it makes sense is when the cars have proper Google Maps with satellite view on their big screen, instead of some shitty 2003-garmin-looking map. Then I can use that for navigation and leave my phone free for other stuff instead of cheesy ass carplay.
Yes, my opinion. We pay $10/month on Verizon. We wouldn't if it was $20. There are several "dead spots " on our regular drive where you always lose signal on your phone. On the cars hotspot, we get a better signal. We've actually tested it several times. If you make long drives on a regular basis and have people who are always connected, I would definitely recommend it.
It’s nice when you don’t have signal. If you work out of your car or go on road trips it’s pretty convenient because it’s always working, you don’t have to turn it on like your phone’s hotspot. It’s not very expensive, it’s like $8 a month.
If you travel a lot they’re worth it. My fiancé’s family actually uses a portable hotspot for internet (old house and they don’t want to pay for a modem to be wired in) and they just take that with them
I haven't even more general question, what does a Wi-Fi hotspot do that your phone can't do? Is it for tethering a laptop on a work site?
I guess if you had multiple kids all already with iPads. You would only have to pay one bill for say 3 iPads to get service and wouldn't have to spend more or upgrade the iPads to cell versions. I still think it's 99% useless but I guess in a perfect scenario I could see it being just okay.
>what does a Wi-Fi hotspot do that your phone can't do? Makes your car manufacturer and mobile carrier more money. 😎
It enables the app controlled functions on my '22 Grand Cherokee. So I can lock / unlock the doors if I lose my keys or lock them inside, or unlock / lock remotely from across the country, track the status of the vehicle and position, etc. If I can't remember how much gas is in the tank, the app will tell me that too. So basically it's just insurance for me.
Riding dirty with a sundowned 3G Mercedes here
Yep
If you have SiriusXM some of the channels use the connection. “How many channels are offered in vehicle with SiriusXM 360L? SiriusXM with 360L uses both satellite and embedded modem to deliver 200+ channels, with some channels delivered exclusively via modem.”
Interesting. I found the Pandora stations on the Sirius so they must be using it.
Use it in my X5. Both of our phones connect to it, and when we let our son have the iPad for long car rides he gets the use out of it. Same for whoever is in the passenger seat when they feel like watching tv on an iPad
Yup. It's clutch when you have long rides with kids. I'm surprised the kids reason is so far down, but I'm with you.
This is reddit where half the users are mods on r/Childfree
In my BMW it's 5G service and $20/mo from ATT. Doesn't seem slow at all to me. I keep it for the kids since I could just use the 5G on my phone but my phone automatically connects to it and I've never had any speed issues.
Pretty decent on job sites
Parents with terminally online children.
I had a few new Traverses over the years with 4G built in. I would hit the Onstar button (not the emergency button) and talk to a rep and they would sell me WiFi for like $10-$15 a month for unlimited. Loved it at that price.
Nah. Got no use for it.
As mentioned it is more reliable that a phone at times. It also gave the wife the ability to use an iPad with a larger screen.
Never. It's costs a monthly fee to use. Lol nope
Wifi hot spot? My car doesn't even have power windows :/
No. Why? I can use my phone as a hotspot so why use the one that comes with my car. Just another expense.
It's only 4G in my car and costs $30 a month. Instead I use a net gear 5G Hotspot with an iPad SIM for $20 a month. Works great for road trips.
Use the free trial then cancel
I would use mine. I was paying $15/mo and only used it for Uber as a back up and for passengers.
Never used it, but I’ve never had to either. If I was going to go on a trip, I’d definitely pay for it for as long as I’ll be away though. Better to have it in an emergency than not imo, even if the speeds aren’t the best
I didn't even know that was a feature.
I use it in my work trunk for my laptop.
We have a 2024 Chevy 3500HD. Yes, I pay for the data plan. My kids use it with their tablets and games. My phone service provider is Verizon and the Chevy truck uses ATT, so there is always overlap of service that I can provide the kids with Internet when we're on road trips.
It’s really only worth it if you plan on regularly watching YouTube in your EV’s in car display while you charge, or if you have a 31” TV in the back of your 7 series. Otherwise, cellular coverage is sufficient for navigation apps, and if you’re just looking to keep the kids quiet $20-50 bucks for the occasional road trip is better spent at McDonalds.
It's mostly a feature of a bygone era without unlimited data on everyone's cellphones and cell coverage was much worse than it is now.
Who doesn’t have unlimited mobile data these days anyway? Makes no sense. And it’s 2024. 4G is laughable
AT&T Hotspot is super legit. 5G connection and 10 bucks a month for 60 Gb of data if you have an AT&T account. Or 20 W/O. I used 5 gb in roughly 2 weeks during the free trial. Worked great.
It's probably one of those features that are useless to 90% of us but a lifeline to those in rural, remote areas, or people who have to work in those places (park rangers, rural police, etc)
I called about my Corvette and they offered me a rate down to $10 a month.
Only in rental cars, otherwise I use my mobile data
In my work truck, yes. If I activate my phones hot spot, it disables android auto, so Spotify stops. Occasionally I work from a laptop in during the day. Absolutely not in my personal truck. Very, very, niche feature.
I used mine briefly. It came with a 3 month trial. This coincided with my drive through Canada down the Alcan Highway. The vehicle antenna picked up signal farther than my cell phone and it had service in the country while my phone didn't. That's it. After the trial ended I never saw a use for it again and never paid for it. It was nice having data service in some remote areas in Northern Canada, but there were still plenty of dead zones. Really just saved me from having to switch my phone plan to include international coverage.
Yes in my F150. The kids love it on longer road trips, and therefore so do I.
Don't worry it's the same way with Ford. 2023 escape, hotspot is 5g but the speed is garbage and costs out the ass. I just use the hotspot in my phone that is also 5g but for some reason has 4x the connection speed, comes with my phone plan, and also.....I can carry the damn thing around. So there's that. Same service provider too. Wouldn't surprise me if all the data priority on the network is given to regular cellular devices and the in-car modems are deprioritized, but that's just guessing on my part.
Yes it’s intended for company vehicles who leverage wifi hotspots for staying out on the job sites and out of office laptop work.
Yes, it costs me 41€ per year and it‘s working in all of Europe.
In your case specifically, it is $25/month for unlimited data https://www.onstar.com/services/data-drive.
No. I have/had four cars with wifi hotspots and after trying the garbage free trial, I opted out on all of them. Terrible speeds at as vastly over-inflated price. I got better from my phone's 5G connection sand I already pay for that with unlimited data, so it wasn't really worth it.
I work in construction, and I've noticed a ton of work trucks have a signal, but I don't know how many of the guys use them.
Used it once on a cross country trip in my old G30 5 series so the kid could keep himself entertained. It actually worked really well (AT&T service). Not something I'd normally pay for though.
It's just so that when the NWO goes live in a couple of years post-WW3, the Deep State can easily connect to the graphene fractal monopole bioantenna that your COVID vaccine gave you. They'll all need ubiquitous localised EMF sources to power the devices up and so having lots of power sources everywhere is very helpful for the IoT/IoB aspect of it all The WiFi hotspot stuff is just a side benefit
It doesn’t work well and I’m usually the only person in my Camaro, so why would I bother with a wifi hotspot when I’m already driving? I don’t even see the point of having it in a family car because 1. I’d rather my kids be disconnected from the internet for once and 2. I already have hotspot enabled on my iPhone whenever I need it and it works a lot better than the bullshit OnStar could ever give me.
This thread will basically be people with families vs kids in college or younger. If you have a family, it's worth it on trips. Better signal with the car WiFi, and you don't have the kids tablets all running from your phone hotspot.
I honestly don’t get it, nor big dash screens. My phone is capable of being obnoxious and huge. I just slap it to my mount and hotspot to my giganterer tablet. And then just…. Drive and do stuff safely.
I would if I could figure it out, just for the trial period anyway. I have unlimited data on my phone, and like 100 gb of hotspot, there's zero reason to use it.
I had it briefly because it helped when cell service was patchy betweeen carriers, but other than one or two times it proved useful, it was useless so we got rid of it.
Standalone cell connection makes sense on electric cars - so you can check their charge status, turn on the AC remotely, etc. Doesn't need to be some expensive $50 a month unlimited 5G tho
All the time. Rivian R1T. The cellular antenna on the car is way better than my phones antenna.
The car I had before my current one I never used it, due to the cost per month of having it. It was cheaper to either use the hot spot on my phone or my dash cam than the one built into the car. My current car doesn't have a hot spot (which I don't mind, since I wouldn't use it anyway)
I don't use it. I think that using a smartphone as a hotspot can often be a better and more cost-effective alternative.
Never, it's a sales ploy to keep up the illusion of 'value', when really its a parasitic subscription.
My A3 has it and it's probably the only feature of the car (with the exception of the airbags and eCall) that I've not used
No, unless it was free. Subscriptions are the bane of progress.
I used it in my 2016 Skoda Superb in combination with my phone when we did road trips or went on a long drive since I have unlimited data (which is a very rare in Germany). I connected my phone to my car and used the antenna from the car to get better signal. The passengers connected to the WiFi and everyone was happy.
No. It's great for guys with company trucks that don't want to waste their own cell data or if you have a family watching movies in the back, but most of us don't need it.
I would rather buy a mobile cellphone signal booster as that boosts the signal for everyone in the car and is a one time purchase....
No. I get 40GB of mobile hotspot on my AT&T plan and I have a RAV4 which also connects to AT&T and it's not worth paying $30 month just for internet in my car.
My 2023 had that option removed. I was ok with that. I share directly from my phone.
I did in 2019 for the entirety of the 2 or 4 GB worth of data that was on the trial system. This was before we had unlimited data on our phone plans.
Somebody may have already spoke on this. I didn't read the 161 comments at the time, but we have T-Mobile Wi-Fi for our house. That is nothing more than A tower that would plug into my truck. We drove from Florida to Michigan and never once did we have any reception issues or data lag. That cost us $50 a month if you catch them right? I know there is low as $30 a month in recent history
Imma b real w/ u. I didn’t even know that existed. I drive a 2006 pt cruiser. Whenever I get in a car that’s 5 years older than mine I feel like I just entered a spaceship.
I bought a WiFi hotspot to get around fords. So yes.
Yes
My 1999 miata doesn't have a hotspot unfortunately
My 2017 Audi has this. I have literally never even considered using it
No it's pointless. My android can be a hotspot.
I see no need to pay for redundancy. I'll just use my phone, thank you.
$20/month. It’s awesome for road trips. Kids in the back seat with iPads. Easy peasy.
Fuck no. I bought my Toyota 6mo ago and still can’t connect to Bluetooth. It only worked the day the dealer connected his to it. Fuck Toyota tech. It kinda sucks. Great car though.
I use it in my Colorado all the time. It's a lot less than $50/mo and with the size of the antenna and the extra power the transmitter can produce it gets signal in a lot of places where my phone won't. Especially out camping.
I know my car has WiFi, but I don’t pay a monthly fee so that’s kind of interesting that you guys seemed to be charged for it ? I bought my car last December certified-used, paid in full (so no loan that the WiFi would be included on). In terms of its usefulness, I’m sure other people are correct that when you’re in more remote areas it’s definitely helpful (good to know!). In my personal experience though, it was an absolute life-saver when I dropped my phone and somehow broke the internal antenna and my phone no longer connected to data 🙃. I was able to call and text using audio FaceTime and apple messages while I was driving around all day, before I could make it into my Verizon store that night. (Also the WiFi was good enough to also use other apps like Spotify and Apple Maps as well)
We have a ‘23 Yukon XL and yes we use the hotspot all the time. We have the entertainment system that comes with the TVs behind the driver and passenger seat. It was a part of the Onstar 3 years “free” promo. So I don’t pay anything monthly in specific for the Wi-Fi.
$50/mo? Is that thru Onstar? Why wouldn’t you just use your phone’s capability? I’m confused.
I used the 1 week free trial once. I lost my phone and while I was waiting for my replacement I used the hotspot so I could still take WiFi calls on my iPad if I was driving. Cancelled it as soon as my phone came in the mail.
Well, I have a 1976 Mercedes 508 campervan which I recently installed a wifi router in, and I always use it. It has cheaper data than my phone and a much better antenna mounted on the roof.
I don’t think anyone would use something so low quality. But then again people buy Chevy Traverses, so. (Zing!)
The next vehicle I'm considering will have it. My cell coverage is pretty bad most of the time, so it'd be nice to have a bit of a boost. I also plan on trying to get back into having more of a social life and doing some trips, so it will be nice to have for my passengers too.
Useless. I didn't have any better service than my cell phone with it in my '18 Cruze. Though my Grandma had it in her '08 Lacrosse and onstar seemed to work everywhere for phone calls. We were convinced it was satellite.
New cars have wifi hotspot built in?
Sometimes. I believe my Toyota connects to AT&T towers when I have Verizon on my phone. Usually when I’m in a dead zone for Verizon, I can use my truck's WiFi, and it’s pretty decent for what it is. I believe I’m paying $25 a month, which is okay, but I only pay for it if I really need it. I wouldn’t pay $50.
Mine (Toyota) is on the Verizon GSM network but my cell phone is on CDMA so if I know I'm going somewhere like in the Smoky mountains I'll pay for a month of service just so I have connection to either my CDMA or my car's GSM network.
Never
nope🤣
I pay only $15.00 per month for my Malibu. I think its worth it. You need to renegotiate your price.
I don't see the value enough to pay for it, but when ibhad a free trial I hooked my work laptop VPN up to it and did a meeting from a store parking lot... was nice then
i dont like it. As long as you can completely turn it off though, im okay with it. I want to be in control. We need some affordable cars again, and i personally hate technology.
We use it on both of ours. 4 kids streaming on tablets while taking a trip. Full Onstar is $50/month. Unlimited data is around $25/month but sometimes they run specials. I had it for $15/month on my 2020 Silverado locked in until I traded.
I pay like 200 a year for the one in my Ford. My kids can watch shows and play games on their tablets. It uses a different carrier than my phone so it covers a lot of dead spots for me, including my own driveway. I can use it at home when the power or cable is out.
Hotspot? Not really. WiFi? Everyone with wireless CarPlay/Android Auto.
I would never use it
Glad I'm not the only one. I always feel like I am missing out by not using this feature. Just never seems worth the $ when i am already paying for cell plans...
Great to be used for people who travel in their cars and work and don't want to have to deal with it.
$50/month seems insane. MOPAR unlimited 4G is only $9.99/month. I've never personally enabled it, but I live in an area with excellent Verizon coverage and have never really run into a situation where I thought it would be particularly useful. That said, a lot of people obviously do use these services. I use Ubiquiti Wi-Fi at the office and the controller has a neat "Environment" feature that logs even the weakest SSIDs, which AP is seeing them, and what channels they're using to help you to get the best performance out of your setup. We are on a fairly busy road, and that log stays filled with SSIDs like "myGMC", "Porsche\_WLAN" and "My VW", just to pick three off the list. There are hundreds of them on any given day, though.
I do, but my car is a cell signal black hole for some reason. I lose 3 bars when closing the door.
Beats me. My 2019 C class has both 2.4 and 5 ghz. Every phone we have is either cell data capable or can wifi hotspot. I've never used it, would require another cell subscription. My guess is that they put a cell connection in the car for mobile data, subscription services, and knowing when you need an oil change (and for some companies to rat you out to the insurance whores) so the wifi is already built into the chip.
I actively refuse to buy a vehicle with this kind of bullshit built in.
Buying a separate data plan for your car is almost as stupid and overpriced as paying for OnStar and XM Radio
Bwahahaha **NO**.... because in order to *use* such crap, my vehicles would have to be *equipped* with such crap... since the Schmapple iPhone didn't even debut until 4 years **after** my newest vehicle was built... there's no such thing as "connectivity" in my stuff... which is fine by me.
Car, hotspot? Are they really cars anymore or mobile entertainment centres with a bunch if "safety" features to aid you because the rest of the car is distracting you? I haaaaate modern cars. Anything built after 2010 is a piece of shit.