Trying to connect to internet

w2rfa

I've been trying to figure out why both my OS3 and OS2 cannot connect to the internet in my car with a mobile connection. I think I see where the issue is...my car wifi is a personal esim and it works just like how an iWatch with cellular makes its connection. My cell phone is paired with the car connection as well as my iWatch. I guess you can say it's an "extension" of my cell phone. So I guess somewhere in the handling of all of this my OS3 will show up on my car dashboard as connected to the car hotspot, yet it is not connected to the internet. If I drop that connection and use my iPhone as a hotspot, it will connect to the iPhone and work as it should. The cell phone is an iPhone 15 ProMax and the vehicle is a BMW with Magenta Drive (T Mobile/BMW connection). The shame of it is I have a data connection that uses the car antenna to maintain a strong signal but it just doesn't seem to play with the OS3. Any thoughts?

Tyrbiter

It's entirely possible that your car's cellular connection does not pass UDP packets, this will stop the openSPOTs from being able to connect to the servers.

w2rfa

If I use my iPhone 15 as a hotspot, the open spot works as it should. Like I stated above, my car internet service is an "extension" of my cell phone. So if I use the phone as a hotspot it works, but if I connect to the cars wifi, it doesn't work. I guess more experimentation is in order.

Tyrbiter

If the car's service does not extend the ports and protocols that the openSPOTs need then that's the problem, I don't know the details but I would be looking for blocked ports and protocols.

w2rfa

My guess at this point is that using the Magenta Drive, the connection is 5G and that filters out the UDP packets. Using my cell phone, even though it is showing a 5G connection, when using it as a hotspot I do not think it is a 5G connection there and maybe 4G does not filter the UDP packets? I'm not too much in the technicalities of how the system works but is there any way for me to check if UDP filtering is taking place?

Tyrbiter

The openSPOTs do not support 5GHz WiFi, just 2.4GHz but you probably know that.

It could be that the connection is deliberately forcing UDP packets to be dropped to prevent the use of VoIP voice and video, if so that may be some form of revenue protection on the part of the service provider. I'm not familiar enough with the arrangements you have there, I don't have any built-in WiFi in my own car but can use my phone's hotspot if I choose to. Of course that is providing a 2.4GHz AP when in use, and it's Android. iPhone's seem to make the hotspot thing a bit less intuitive to use.

If you have a laptop you could try using it to capture the WiFi packets in promiscuous mode using Wireshark, but to do that means filtering what it is receiving and piecing together the clues, it isn't simple even though the latest Wireshark has good capabilities it requires some care in configuration because otherwise you will be swamped in packets for other services that are not relevant to your problem.

Maybe the openSPOT's log output can help, you may see a difference between the working and not working connection methods.