ccooke01
Well-Known Member
- First Name
- Carl
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2020
- Threads
- 7
- Messages
- 70
- Reaction score
- 54
- Location
- UK
- Vehicles
- Taycan 4S and ID.4
Completely agree with Adrian regarding the Laws of Physics, the round trip time for the transactions will be longer the further away you are from servers, that said there are a number of "best practises" to minimise the network latency, these can help but don't eliminate the delay.Basically, you can't change the laws of physics and you can't travel faster than the speed of light (no matter how long we might all want to live long and prosper!).
If, as we believe, the Connect servers are centralised in Germany then we aren't really talking about a "cloud based" service in the true sense. Any company worth its salt would know to build a resilient cloud based solution by deploying (and mirroring / replicating) for example on Azure (Microsoft Cloud Services) or AWS (Amazon Web Services) and yes there are other choices out there. Truth is we don't have that insight to know exactly what architecture Porsche are currently using or plan to use in the future.
Hopefully, the architecture is such that it will be mirrored / replicated / follows the sun across the globe so that we might all benefit from a more resilient, stable and reliable core service. This will help to reduce our perception of latency in the end to end service.
Of course, this in itself won't cure all of our moans and groans as the "last mile" connection here is dependent on the OTA (via LTE) service on the vehicle itself. So depending on cell / mobile reception and wake up time of the vehicle (I assume there is one otherwise the 12v battery could die for all of us) I don't think we are ever going to see spectacular end to end connectivity.
The current architecture is arguably weak / best it can be just now and we just have to live with it until something better comes along.
I suspect one of the drivers to have the "servers" located in Germany could be related to Data Protection rules across Europe, Germany provides the strongest regulation in this space, which means if you are compliant in Germany, you are covered for the rest of the world.
Of cause this doesn't help when the car is located thousands of miles away, an alternative is to use the WiFi hotspot within the car itself. You need to stand close to the car to connect to the WiFi, this will then allow you to manage features of the vehicle, from my experience it removes the need for the App to connect to the Porsche backend Infrastructure and therefore connects a lot faster.
I plan to test a WiFi extender device to see if I can increase the range of the onboard hotspot, what I am not clear on is a) how far I can extend the network and b) how it will react when the WiFi network disappears as the car leaves and then returns.
I will update the thread after testing.
Sponsored