Online services - are they actually worth it??

[Feltwell]

Hello! 1st post here and a total technophobe, so be gentle.....

Always liked my big Audis, on my 3rd A6 Avant now, but tend to keep my cars for a long time. I've just replaced my 2005 4.2V8 C6 with a 2016 C7 S6 Avant, with toys - a very nice motor. Fuel bill may bring me back down to earth, I had the C6 on LPG !

Just blundering my way through the hugely complicated MMI system (car has Tech Pack Advanced). Tried to get the car to connect to the internet via my work's iPhone (too tight to pay for the data ;-) ) but apparently they don't do RSAP or some other acronym, so it won't work. Personal phone is an elderly iPhone so that's a no go too.

So... I stuck a cheap PAYG sim card into the dash. Got it working, but is it actually worth it? The Google Earth stuff doesn't work (and am I right in saying from what I've read elsewhere it won't ever work now on my age of car?). Other than that it just seems to tell me things like what the weather is right now (I have windows for that...!) and a few other inconsequential things.

Does the connected services stuff do anything to the Sat Nav to help it route through traffic? My old A6 had MMI high but the sat nav would only use the TMS messages, I ended up giving up on it and just using Google Maps on my phone as the routing around traffic jams was so much better.

What's the consensus? Useful stuff in there or not?

Cheers!

 

[B5NUT]

Depending on the network you can by a 12month data sim from around £20 with 12 GB of data. I use it for the online live traffic and sometimes my daughter connects her tablet to the internal WIFI so for £1.66 I have one in regardless. Some years I've used all the data some I have not.

 

[Bishop187]

I got a free sim from Three. Gives u 200mb a month for free. U can order it from their website


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Feltwell]

I got a free sim from Three. Gives u 200mb a month for free. U can order it from their website

That's a good tip, thanks. My Audi Connect licence is valid until September, after that who knows?

Does anyone know if the satnav uses traffic data sourced via Connect?

 

[NHN]

Depending on the network you can by a 12month data sim from around £20 with 12 GB of data. I use it for the online live traffic and sometimes my daughter connects her tablet to the internal WIFI so for £1.66 I have one in regardless. Some years I've used all the data some I have not.

Is that the vsim?

 

[B5NUT]

The C7 never had the internal VSIM, Flacelift cars that had techpack came with a sim slot. Pre-FL car the sim card slot was an option (think parts of an online services option) but you needed to also select tech pack.

 

[AndyT306]

i put a sim in, was going to use google traffic on it - didn't seem as up to speed as the phone app so lost faith in it - everything else is useless in my opinion

only slight benefit was being able to google search on the sat nav, but i think you have to use the free draw to spell, so a pain while driving

 

[fingermouse]

Iphone don`t do RSAP neither do dual sim android phones, I use mine mainly for traffic updates but also have either waze or google on at the same time