cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

The WiFi Hotspot speed is absolutely horrible

blue_canyon21
New Contributor II

I get that nowhere on the site or in any promotional material does it say that the hotspot speeds are meant to be high speeds. But, if I'm paying $25/month for it, it should be better than .5Mbps.

I can't even download a 100kb Excel file let alone stream anything from any streaming platform. Even Pandora has trouble streaming audio on the lowest quality setting.

I've called support and they have "reset" things and said, "It should be better now. If not, give it a few days." Well, it's been a few days and 3 more calls to support and guess what... WiFi still sucks.

This is my last resort to get GM/OnStar to do anything about this. Obviously, I'm not the only one with this issue.

29 REPLIES 29

tricon23
New Contributor II

My Speedtest shows ATT Enterprise. 

John62
New Contributor II

I’ve been through several layers of support and never heard this. I went out and fired up speedtest… AT&T Enterprise is my connection.  As long as I was there, decided to run the test and see if anything changed… I actually got a whopping 1 meg download speed (sense the sarcasm?).  Turned off Wifi… according to speedtest, I am using AT&T Enterprise, so I am comparing apples to apples… 88 meg download speed.

 

Back in August I was due state inspection. I called OnStar to inquire if they had an upgrade to 5G since it has been around a while.  No such solution.  They really should recall these hotspots and replace them with something useable!

tricon23
New Contributor II

John62 how old is your vehicle? Mine is a 2022 Equinox and has the 4G LTE service. I assume the older 2G/3G if it still works would be that slow. If I have 4-5 signal bars then pulling 50-90 meg down is not an issue. 

John62
New Contributor II

I have a 2016 SRX.  In my numerious calls to OnStar, I've always been 4-5 bars to make sure they did not blame issue on signal strength. In addition, I compare my phone connected to Cell Service vs Wifi and my phone uses the same AT&T Enterprise. I think I've quoted the Onstar website earlier in this post about they are better because they have bigger antenna and car battery.  Ha, what a joke!!!.  Directly from the owners manual.. "With OnStar 4G LTE and Wi-Fi®, up to seven devices (smartphones, tablets and laptops) can be connected to high-speed
Internet through the vehicle’s built-in Wi-Fi hotspot."  I wonder if anyone has ever filed a complaint regarding truth in advertising.

 

John62
New Contributor II

BTW: I'm jealous!

tricon23
New Contributor II

Well I guess it's possible that the head units degrade over time, but looks like your testing correctly ATT vs ATT. You could cancel service and get an external portable hot spot. Not the best solution I know. Also shot in the dark, have you done a factory reset and the unit is updated to the latest software? You may have to connect your car to your home wifi and try the update for your head unit.

John62
New Contributor II

On one of my many calls, the support tech did verify I was updated. I  don't ever remember a procedure that involved connecting to my home network. 

2017Malibu2-0T
New Contributor

As a highly compulsive, detail-oriented tech enthusiast and expert who specializes in automotive infotainment (amongst other automotive tech applications) I would suggest going into the infotainment settings and seeing if there are any software updates  available; be sure that the date and time of your infotainment are correct, download/lookup At&t service maps in your area and try the in vehicle wifi somewhere urban that has excellent at&t 4g lte coverage. Cell phone carriers built abundant high speed, low range towers (technical description of this type of tower would be high bandwidth or wide-band). 
do a thorough sweep of your hotspots connectivity range for anything potentially causing interference: bluetooth devices, smartphones connecting to cellphone carrier networks - i.e. your  5g smartphone could be confusing your vehicle’s antenna. 
another factor could be that due to much of what this new 5g infrastructure is is actually just 4g lte towers that were adapted & converted to 5g so coverage could be more limited than one might expect for a 4g dedicated in vehicle hotspot. Check your vehicles antennae to see if it’s at all damaged or improperly installed, unscrewed partially or being impeded in some other way (like maybe the protective cover is preventing it from functioning properly.) 

most likely problem is you connecting  your smartphone to your vehicles infotainment via bluetooth or USB. Keep in mind the infotainment system is only so powerful and connecting a modern powerful 5g smartphone to your much less powerful simpler infotainment is going to  jeopardize the infotainments ability to allocate whatever 4g connectivity the antenna is able to gather. May even have a hard time telling the antenna to gather signal to begin with. All functions take some level of computing/processing power and seeking out connection then outputting gathered signal to devices definitely is one of the more demanding tasks infotainment centers have to take on.. this is evidenced by anyone who has used their phone as a mobile hotspot and paid attention to how hot their device got after 10 minutes of connecting other devices to the internet. 

John62
New Contributor II

I have verified current softwave many times with support.  Tonight, I took your advice and parked near 4G AT&T tower.  I have both a Samsung S9 and iPhone 11. Neither are 5G. I powered off my S9 and turned bluetooth off on my iPhone (which is also on the AT&T network).   I could go thru all my testing processes, but trust me I tested many times and performance still horrible. Cellular network connection blows the doors of WiFi hotspot!  I've begun to wonder if GM forgot to connect the antenna to the head unit! I thought I would stream music on the drive home while connected to Wifi hotspot... Boy was I wrong... more time buffering than actually playing music.  Dearlership is useless... as long as you can connect to the WiFi hotspot they say everything is fine.  There really is no hardware support from Onstar.  They say they've reset unit and downloaded new/updated code, but nothing changes.  I've really given up.  I will definitely never buy a car based on it having Onstar.  I would laugh at any sales agent that attempted to sell me a car based on the benefits on Onstar!

This is definitely not the sentiment we like to hear, John. We recognize that you may have already connected with a live OnStar advisor, however, if you're still experiencing connectivity concerns pushing your blue button to speak with our Technical team will allow them to ensure that your hotspot is working to the best of its abilities.  Additionally, since cellular and wireless network capabilities can impact your in-vehicle Wi-Fi's performance, we recommend reviewing OnStar's Data Coverage Map at https://www.onstar.com/us/en/coverage_map/ to review the coverage availability in your area.