BMW Connected drive 3G to 4G?

[alohart]

Donnie do you know if it's going to be through a wifi connection or is there a workaround for cellular connectivity?

If it uses a WiFi connection, it won't be of any use while away from one's home. It won't be of any use to those of us who park beyond the range of our home WiFi base station.

If it uses a cellular data connection, a monthly fee to the cellular data provider would be required. In the U.S., the AT&T cellular data fee was paid by BMW for 10 years after our 2014 i3 purchase. By refusing to offer a 3G -> 4G upgrade, BMW is likely saving money because it won't have to continue paying AT&T.

[djbrh]

Donnie do you know if it's going to be through a wifi connection or is there a workaround for cellular connectivity?

Both. You’ll be able to configure it to auto-connect to your Wi-Fi when available and use the cell data connection when not. It’s using an iot sim and your cost per month will only be like $2 since it uses almost no actual bandwidth. The messages it needs to pass are relatively tiny and not terribly frequent in the grand scheme…

And someone will have to pay something to run a cloud service to manage the message passing, but I really think it’s all possible for something under $5/month. And I don’t think anyone is trying to make any money on this, but actual costs to run everything will have to come from somewhere.

[briantompo]

Status update on the “aftermarket” hack? I don’t know the wizards involved but I’m interested in the solution.
Thx, Brian

[ksnax]

Wondering if anybody has installed the Open Vehicle Monitoring System yet?

I don't care about cell service with it, but I really want climate control operation!