Volvo XC40 Forums

Though a dealer would never agree with me, I'm convinced after a service back in January that the car gets worse reception for the P-SIM I have installed in the car to use services like Spotify.

Pretty much every time I start the car I'm 5 minutes into driving when the music suddenly comes on. If I skip a track I might have a full minute of "Buffering..." before anything starts playing. The album art on the dashboard is somehow out of sync with the main screen on occasion.

It's an EE SIM so maybe their coverage has somehow become worse in the 75 mile radius I usually travel. I might try Vodafone to see if that's any better as I believe that's what the Volvo SIM uses.

Anyone else having a similar problem? It definitely used to be quicker, seeing "Buffering..." used to be a rare occurrence.

Paying for a music service isn't for me. I tried the free month with Spotify and that was it. When I used it though, over the past month, it seemed fine as far as connection and speed. Shame it doesn't work with a free Spotify account.

You could try to connect a phone to the car wifi and run a speed test before you start your journey and also try to use spotify on the device via the car wifi.

This would show you if it was the PSIM or the car. I have a lot of issues with my vodafone sim - initial buffering is normally 30-90 seconds on start up. I know I live in an area with very poor signal so I live with it will the year runs out then will change operator.

Good luck getting it sorted out.

I don't use the modem in my XC40 so, only thinking out loud here - feel free to ignore my ramblings.

I find in-car streaming to be quite poor in the UK anyway, but on a previous car with its own modem/sim, I found I had to give up on the idea of letting my phone connect to its hotspot. It was fine leaving home (where my phone had been connected to WiFi) but not leaving work at the end of the day. A phone that's been away from WiFi all day can suddenly want to perform a load of updates on connecting to the car & hog the already limited bandwidth.

Incidentally, your operator's service may well be dropping if, as I suspect, the in-car modem is only working on 3g. I may be completely wrong here but, when I purchased my XC40, I found lots of Volvo online documentation referring to the modems being 3g only. A lot of these references have disappeared now so they may have been out of date or incorrect??? Does anyone have a better understanding of this?

Best to have your phone, and anything else for that matter, to update when you want it to, rather than autoupdates. Just go into settings on various devices and switch off autoupdate.

Via my iPhone (Three) it's a bit slow at my house which is to be expected, after that it works perfectly fine so I'm going to chalk it up to the car, or just terribly bad luck and buffering the next track when the EE coverage happens to drop out.

Guess I'll just have to live with it as there isn't any real way of troubleshooting or getting some diagnostics myself!

Actually, if using my phone's hotspot (as i find it a lot more reliable for anything else) i noticed the same buffering issue. It annoyed me so much, i dragged the app at the bottom of the screen and forgot about it.

General way of doing it now is just playing on phone over bluetooth. Faster, more reliable, and if music won't start (if used other audio apps since last drive) i can just start it from my watch and call it a day.

So...i feel it's the Spotify implementation, not the sim itself (albeit not saying that's good either haha)

Silver Moose wrote: ↑Mon Jul 13, 2020 7:26 am Incidentally, your operator's service may well be dropping if, as I suspect, the in-car modem is only working on 3g. I may be completely wrong here but, when I purchased my XC40, I found lots of Volvo online documentation referring to the modems being 3g only. A lot of these references have disappeared now so they may have been out of date or incorrect??? Does anyone have a better understanding of this?

I ran a speed test on the connection in my 2020 model in-car modem and got 28 Mbps download and 21 Mbps upload. Such speeds are possible on 4G or 3G HSPA+ networks. I can’t find anywhere a clear confirmation that my P-SIM is on 4G network.

eugen61 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:07 pm

Silver Moose wrote: ↑Mon Jul 13, 2020 7:26 am Incidentally, your operator's service may well be dropping if, as I suspect, the in-car modem is only working on 3g. I may be completely wrong here but, when I purchased my XC40, I found lots of Volvo online documentation referring to the modems being 3g only. A lot of these references have disappeared now so they may have been out of date or incorrect??? Does anyone have a better understanding of this?

I ran a speed test on the connection in my 2020 model in-car modem and got 28 Mbps download and 21 Mbps upload. Such speeds are possible on 4G or 3G HSPA+ networks. I can’t find anywhere a clear confirmation that my P-SIM is on 4G network.

I checked the P-SIM data traffic consumption with my mobile service provider and it was confirmed I’m using 4G network. So my 2020 model in-car modem is 4G capable.

One thing that has been mentioned on this forum before - Is the spotify app up to date or is an update waiting to be installed? Not having the latest version can cause some strange problems.