My understanding is that Teslas in Canada have "native" AT&T SIM cards and are roaming in Canada on Rogers' 3G network. That is all well and good while Tesla is paying the bill (except for the outages that many of us experience despite strong signals) - but what happens when the four years are up and we have to foot the bill ourselves? Will we be paying roaming rates for the data? Can I add the car's SIM to my existing plan for $10 as I can do with Rogers for my other devices, like iPad, LTE-Wifi hotpsot, etc.
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I suspect we won't know the answer to that for a couple of years at least.
When I bought my car they were promising one year free service to Signature owners. A year passed and it kept working. Eventually Elon promised four years free. That will take me to December 2016.
My suspicion is that putting the payment system into place would be more expensive and distracting for them, compared to just giving the service away for free. Who knows if that equation will change in the future...
If Tesla decides to charge an arm and a leg for the service, I'll simply leave an old iPhone in the car. I'll plug it into the USB jack for power, and leave it set to continuously operate as a hotspot. Voila! $10 per month.
When I bought my car they were promising one year free service to Signature owners. A year passed and it kept working. Eventually Elon promised four years free. That will take me to December 2016.
My suspicion is that putting the payment system into place would be more expensive and distracting for them, compared to just giving the service away for free. Who knows if that equation will change in the future...
If Tesla decides to charge an arm and a leg for the service, I'll simply leave an old iPhone in the car. I'll plug it into the USB jack for power, and leave it set to continuously operate as a hotspot. Voila! $10 per month.
3G is getting pretty cheap nowadays, especially when purchased in "bulk" as I'm sure Tesla does. Electronic component manufacturers are warning designers to stop using 2G components because the carriers are starting to discontinue those services. That means 3G will become the new bottom end which will drive the price down. I find the web browser in the MS to be a bit pokey, which is mostly a data speed issue. I wonder when Tesla will start shipping 4G.
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Slight correction:
Elon was clear that it would be four years from the day of the announcement. You will have beyond Dec 2016, Doug_G.
More like until January 2018.Free data for four years!
Last edited by a moderator:
Slight correction:
Elon was clear that it would be four years from the day of the announcement. You will have beyond Dec 2016, Doug_G.
Free data for four years!
Right you are... I had forgotten that briefly. Thanks for the correction. By then my car will be 5 years old.
green1
Active Member
TELUS has already mostly turned down 2g, every cell site they operate is 3G or higher (with a large percentage being LTE) and the remaining iden sites are being shut down shortly (iden network already has worse coverage than the normal 3g/lte network)
There is a case to be made that 2G will live on to service IoT devices as 3G and LTE radios cost a lot more and many IoT devices are low bandwidth users. See: 2G Awaits Its Internet of Things Revival
green1
Active Member
Great case, not real world. The spectrum used by 2G can serve a LOT more customers as 3G/LTE, and in addition the 2G equipment at the telco end is often EOL'd by the manufacturer making continued support difficult. The Canadian telecoms are ditching it as quickly as they can, much of it is already gone.
I didn't think Telus had any 2G network to start with. Bell and Telus both made the transition to GSM from CDMA by rolling out entirely new infrastructure (together) and put in place an HSPA (3G) network as their base in the world of GSM. This is why you'll never see a Bell device go to anything less than 3G while on the Bell network because they simply don't have a 2G network to fall back on.
igotzzoom
Active Member
Is LTE capability built-in? I thought there were some significant hardware differences between 3G and LTE receivers?
It may require a hardware upgrade to go to LTE but there is speculation that this can be done by replacing a circuit board. Or some vehicles may have joint LTE/3G radios but the LTE hasn't been enabled by software yet. As you may be aware vehicles that have been received in the last week or two do now have LTE radios.
mknox
Well-Known Member
You'd think, but the utility I work for has a number of 2G connected metering devices, and we've received notification from the supplier that 2G is going to be shut down at some point soon. I think the Telcos are going to have to come to the realization that if they really want in to the machine-to-machine space, they're going to have to keep some form of service alive for more than just a few years. It's not like consumer cell phones that get replaced every couple of years.
green1
Active Member
TELUS has an extensive iden network, iden is normally considered 2g. That network is now EOL and the remaining users are being actively transitioned off of it.
CDMA was also a 2g network and was completely removed from service shortly after the HSPA upgrade.
Quite a bit.
For the audio: suppose 128 kb/s. That's 16 kilobytes/s. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so that's 57.6 MB/hour. But maybe the streaming data rate is much lower?
For the screen: that's pretty close to impossible to answer. Is the map displayed whole screen or half screen? With imagery on or off? North-up mode or not? How fast is the car travelling? How closely is the map zoomed? Is it traveling east-west or north-south? All these things impact how much data needs to be sent. (If full screen and you're travelling east-west you'll go through more imagery than if you're going north-south, in North-Up mode.)
In addition, we are not privy to exactly how things are represented. If lines-only maps are represented in vector form, then the data requirements are quite small. It seems to me, however, that they are sent as bitmaps. The display, according to completely unreliable Internet sources
is 1920x1200. So, suppose you have it full-screen and zoomed and the car moving in such a way as to require a half screen of new data each minute. That would be a bit more than a MB as an uncompressed bitmap, but of course the imagery I'm sure is sent compressed. So how much compression will there be? It depends on the imagery. Yes, it actually depends not just how fast you're going and in which direction, but where you are.Now with extreme zooming and imagery turned on, I can imagine going through a half screen of data every 10 seconds or so, so about 6 times as quickly. So, uncompressed, 6 MB/minute. Probably closer to 0.5 MB/minute compressed, or 30 MB/hour.
So, very vaguely, probably no more than 100 MB/h (0.1 GB/h). But maybe more like 10 MB/h (0.01 GB/h).
Slacker now has a higher 320kbps bitrate option. But it is not clear that this high quality stream is available to the plan used by Tesla owners. If it is that would dramatically increase the data usage.
The biggest usage is for stuff like software updates but as long as your Tesla connec ts into your Wifi then you are good. I will look at my WAP control software today but I believe that my Tesla has averaged several GB per month in the five months that I have owned it.
I did a test today with Slacker running continuously and I got a bit over 1MB/minute - to be exact 42MB in 39 minutes. I have Slacker set to high quality but I am only getting 128kbps.
FYI - my Tesla has consumed over 28GB on my Wifi connection over 5 months and this is with pretty much no music, unless it is listening to music on its own at night. You wouldn't want to have to pay for that.
beeeerock
Active Member
I asked for, and received, my Slacker password from Tesla. I then went on-line and tweaked my high quality setting to the 320 kbit rate on the Slacker page. Since then, it *appears* that the music takes longer to load than it did before, and the sound seems a little better... so I believe I'm listening to 320 kbits in the car now. Or enjoying a placebo effect... ;-)
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