Skoda 000051409F Surfstick Carstick LTE Connect, only for Amundsen navigation system (Gen. 2)

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SD Card music - my car has the Dynaudio speakers - which sound outstanding to me. I wanted to give them something high quality as a source. CDs sound incredible, but so do does high-quality digital music files from the SD card. This lives in Slot 1 now, and has all my favourite music on it. I know most people now probably don't have a digital music collection like this, but I still do, so might as well use it. To my ears, it sounds better than either bluetooth-based audio, or my wired Android Auto phone using high quality Spotify streaming. Its also very easy to get to the album or artist you want, or just to shuffle the whole thing. Set up car again with wizard and worked straight away. One week later No Internet. Carried out the above myself this time. Worked for 8 weeks ish and then No Internet. As you can imagine this is like getting a new phone and setting it up again every couple of weeks and TBH getting a bit ****ed off with it.

You can tether it when you plug it in to the USB port (with hotspot on and discoverable) and it will connect and continue working after you unplug. I think tethering via cable will also work as at some point yesterday, the globe was white but it didn't say WLAN next to it, and it still worked (this was with hotspotting turned off, because I was also using car play to try and get the OneSkoda app working, but more of that on a different thread...). Plugging it in with hotspot enabled then forces it to connect and it continues to work after unplugging. Connecting to an EE iPhone over wifi hotspot is particularly slow (I've found it unreliable on everything, regualrly having to turn the hotspot on/off/on to make a connection actually access the interent). Either a connection via wifi hotspot take a reasonable amount of time to connect, but if you leave it and then open Skodaconnect, it will work.

Personal Hotspot on and linked to car. Both phones paym contracts allowed data sharing without any setup or cost. Problems so far very few, found for some reason the USB cable was critical as connection to iPhone 5 occasionally crashed with a cheaper quality cable which charged fine, worked with data to laptop but was iffy with car-net. Daft thing is, parked in the drive, it links almost immediately with my home WiFi enabling me to upload destinations input to the app. The nuisance is, without a reliable data connection the traffic updates don’t work. The other features of Skoda Connected I can happily live without.

You state "Personal hotspot on and linked to car.". I'm sorry but I don't understand this. I am assuming that you have not configured your iPhone as a WiFi hotspot and that the Infotainment system does not connect as a WLAN client. So what is a "personal hotspot" in relation to an iPhone? I also use the weconnect app on my phone to send locations to the car before a new journey. Then when you get into the car it pops up on the screen with the new destination and you just tap to go there. I am still not sure whether your iPhone is configured as a mobile WiFi router AND is also connected to the Infotainment system by USB cable – that is, you use both types of connection. I'm driving the vRS to work tomorrow so I'll carry on experimenting to try and confirm these methods.Have you got a Columbus or Amundsen head unit? My Amundsen doesn’t have a globe, but a standard Wi-fi fan type symbol instead. Are you saying you can tether it via USB, or do you mean connect to the personal hotspot whilst it’s plugged into CarPlay? There was some uncertainty about whether you can tether the Virgin sim, but I've had 3 devices at once connected to it and had no connection issues, but it is painfully slow for browsing and streaming is almost impossible.

If you don't have the discovery nav you can still just use the mini wi-fi router to create a network without having to go through the head unit.The Discover Media happily connects to the Huawei modem, seems to be getting all the correct traffic updates, CarPlay is streaming music etc.

I don't have a smart phone at the moment. I'm trying to decide which one to buy and which SIM plan to get. I'm leaning towards an Android phone though. VW UK Customer Services say that they receive fewer support requests from drivers with iPhones than they do from drivers with Android phones. When I pointed out that there are probably about four times as many Android phones in the world as there are iPhones, they couldn't comment any further!Yes, Car-Net Guide and Inform (Basic) comes as standard equipment on my model. I did not want App-Connect which you appear to have. You state that you connect your iPhone to the Infotainment system using a USB cable, but then you refer subsequently to using only Apple CarPlay, Siri, Apple Maps, etc.. Can you connect via USB cable and use the Car-Net Guide and Inform services? As implied in my original post, this way of connecting is not mentioned in my Infotainment manual. As a whole the only part of Car-Net I find useful (excluding in my case the very much used CarPlay) is the upload of destinations to the DNS satnav from the comfort of an armchair. Siri works very well, activated by voice dial button on steering wheel using the car microphone. Functions better than my previous Golf which had voice control. I have the comfort dash, so I leave it plugged into the USB slot in the glove box and every time I start the van it connects to the discovery nav head unit and creates a wi-fi network in the van. The router also has a little slot for a mini SD card, so you can still use the USB port for storage of music or photos etc.