Carplay and Wifi conflict

[Greybeard72]

So whenever I have my car in my garage and connected to the house Wifi, carplay doesn't work. I can connect my phone to play music and use the phone functions but the Carplay function is not available. I know I've see this posted elsewhere as an issue in these forums. I have no clue as to why this is. In any case, if I drive the car down the road and the wifi connection icon drops (an 'if' sometimes -- it periodically doesn't clear for some bizarre reason) all of a sudden carplay pops up as ready to go..

In my garage, my phone and car are on the same wifi network. It 'may' have something to do with the car hotspot function?? who knows.. in any case, if anyone has that issue and can explain why, I'd love to hear it. I've gotten used to periodic and random errors with this car popping up since they tend to clear quickly .. especially the 'limited assitance' ones.. it seems connection services is very flaky. It took a while for me to figure out how to connect my car to my wifi. I thought it may be helpful especially for downloads but it also seems that Porsche is going to be very very sparing with those OTA updates so maybe connecting to wifi is kind of useless at home?

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[PrudentOcean]

Wireless CarPlay uses Wifi, where the car creates a network for the phone to connect to.

It seems that the car can’t create that network and be connected as a client to another Wifi network at the same time.

 

[LivingTheDream]

Too reiterate what PruydentOcean said and expand on it a bit...

CarPlay depends on connecting to a WiFi that is created by the car itself. So, when you connect your car to your house's WiFi, you defeat that. When your car disconnects from the house WiFi (i.e., when you drive away), it restores the car-created WiFi and CarPlay grabs onto it.

 

[Greybeard72]

Thanks to you both. That makes sense. Didn’t realize they didn’t use BT to do that. Also makes clear why I can still connect my iPhone via BT to get phone and music but not CarPlay. I have only had wired CarPlay in the past. I’ll have to study a bit more about wireless CarPlay .. especially as 2.0 is supposedly coming. Not sure why sometimes it thinks it’s still connected to the house WiFi almost a mile away but that’s probably another of the glitches so prevalent in the car. Still fantastic to drive though.

 

[PrudentOcean]

I want to point out that it isn’t impossible for a Wifi radio to both connect to a Wifi network and create its own at the same time. My iPhone can connect to a Wifi network and act as a Hotspot for other devices.

Hopefully Porsche can fix this in a software update.

 

[PrudentOcean]

Bluetooth is used to discover CarPlay devices, but doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth for playing media etc., so the connection then switches to Wifi.

 

[Greybeard72]

Thanks. Once I saw your response, I figured that was the case. A bit like casting/airplay must use a WiFi connection. I remember reading also that the car can generate a hotspot also assuming Verizon can give us enough bandwidth (ha ha). Hopefully the car can also do, in the future, what you mentioned.. both generate an internal WiFi and connect to one.

 

[alxman]

I have an eero mesh WiFi system and I can pause the connection to an individual device (Macan) easily. I wonder whether that could solve the issue with CarPlay when I am ready to use it without having to wait until I drive away and lose connection with the home WiFi. My car is getting prepared for delivery at the dealership so I will be able to test this theory soon and I will report the results. Most of the current WiFi systems allow you to easily pause the connection to devices in your network so that could be a relatively simple manual fix to the problem until an automated solution is provided.

 

[Greybeard72]

I Have a netgear Orbi system. I could do that as well but it’s not as easy on the app as it is with eero. I’m waiting to get the Eero 7 mesh. I will wait till Porsche figures it out. They have a lot to do to the software. Maybe they’ll end up buying Rivian sooner than later. They need each other.

 

[SimonEV]

In Connections you can choose between Phone and Radio or Carplay. You can't have Carplay and the others - try selecting them and the other options will be turned off.

Sometimes when you want Carplay to be active it may not have started or the other options are selected so that a choice has to be made - which to use.

A simple analogy for the WiFi is, like an iPhone, activating an iPhone Hotspot prevents simultaneously connecting to another WiFi Service. That's a hardware restriction so a software update is unlikely to fix it. Like an iPhone the Macan does have Wifi on two bands active - but they are not independent of each other?

Have you noticed that many of the Settings include a Help button. If you have the Manual installed that can be quite useful except that it's not available when you drive (and your Passenger is trying to connect).

 

[Greybeard72]

I had noticed that already. I have the manual installed on my app but search is only ok and their terminology is sometimes obscure making simple keyword search difficult. Thanks

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