Buddyk

There is a problem with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+ and using "Personal Hotspot" wifi sharing to the 2015 S550 (and possibly other Mercedes models for all I know).

I was easily able to use the Personal Hotspot function from iPhone 5S running iOS 8, but for some quirky reason, it just wouldn't work with iPhone 6 or iPhone 6+

I just upgraded to iOS 8.1.3 and I will report here if the problem has been fixed by this update as of Jan 27, 2015.

If anyone else knows what I am talking about, I'd appreciate your input.

I just got my car in January, and have not been able to get my iPhone to provide internet (wifi) to the S550 from iPhone 6/6+

It may be a Bluetooth issue actually, not that surprising. Still working on it.

DaveVY

I thought the hotspot sharing was ONLY the S sharing its internet with other devices. I don't recall reading in the manual that a phone could share its internet with the S. Apparently I need to get my manual back out to read again!

Buddyk

Yes, I know what you mean. I skimmed a few of the threads and most of them are quite unclear about it, or seem to miss the point.

Probably most of us realize that it is not so useful to have the S550 share access to the internet through it's own wifi hotspot when the source of the internet connection is some Mercedes branded built in pay service with 3G speed limits. Maybe it has a wide range of service across the globe or something advantageous that I am not seeing, but I think the speeds would make it painful to use.

Most of us realize that it is trivial to share internet from any iPhone with Personal Hotspot directly without the S550 being involved.

BUT - I want to share the iPhone's LTE data internet connection over Personal Hotspot wifi with the S550 so I can try out the built-in apps, and other "built-in" browser things on my fancy dashboard.

TestnDoc

Any updates on this? I would love to be able to access the Apps using 4G from my iPhone 6.

Buddyk

I tried it this evening, and no luck.

If you have a 5S it's no problem to use personal hotspot as your wifi internet source so that you can access the "Mercedes Apps" and "Mercedes Mobile Website" - but I have not been able to get it to work with either iPhone 6 or 6+

I have taken it to the dealer and one of the salesmen who thought he could help me do it in 2 minutes was stumped for an hour before giving up as well.

I think the S550 might possibly need a firmware update that addresses the issue.

There is something non-standard about the way it tries to link up to the personal hotspot on an iPhone 6.

I'd like to know if ANYONE has used personal hotspot on a 2015 S550 successfully with an iPhone 6 or 6+

How about anyone else at least doing it with a 5S? I can do it with my old 5S too, but would like to get someone else to help me look into it.

If anyone knows how to find out if there are any service bulletins about this issue, that might also help.

I'll keep looking into it and see if I can find the solution - I doubt that it's just me, but that is a possibility. But more likely it's a problem that nobody else or few people have noticed yet.

alshaikh85

Hello Buddyk,

I tried with iPhone 5s and another android phone but was not able to access the "Mercedes Apps" and "Mercedes Mobile Website" using the wi-fi hot spot of my phone.


How did you do it using your iPhone 5s? Appreciate sharing with us your experienceon on this.


Thanks.

Buddyk

I'll be doing some testing with a friend on the weekend.

My friend has an iPhone 6+ also.

I have an iPhone 5S, an iPhone 6, and and iPhone 6+

When I swap my sim card to the 5S - I can get Personal Hotspot working on 2015 S550.

If I try the same sim card on my regular iPhone 6+ it doesn't work

If I try the same sim card on my alternate iPhone 6 it also doesn't work.

Now I will try my friends iPhone 6+

If it works on his, I will try some other combinations to find the culprit:

I will try with my friends iPhone 6+ with my sim card

I will try with my iPhone 6/6+ with my friends sim card

These results will be interesting for the debug I believe - so I am interested to see the results.


PS - While we do some testing I will make a quick video of the successful "Personal Hotspot" tethering procedures from the iPhone 5S and post a link to it here. I could write the procedure, but am hoping I can find a quicker and better way to illustrate it for you and all the others who may be interested.

Radman991

More and more cars are advertising 4G as standard equipment. With the best or nothing, has there been any talk of upgrading the 2015 S to 4 g? I haven't tried to use my iPhone 6 as a hotspot for the car but have used the cars 3 G as a hotspot for my iPad.

Buddyk

Sorry I didn't make a video but I'll explain briefly for now:

On your iPhone, turn on Personal Hotspot in "Settings - Cellular - Personal Hotspot" - you have to give it a password to turn it on, but don't worry, with Bluetooth tethering, your vehicle will not need to use the password, it will just use the bluetooth tethering method of using your iPhone's personal hotspot.

Have you already paired your phone to the car previously? If so, then all you need to do now is navigate to Phone/Internet, and turn the knob to "Internet" and select that. Then select one of the internet choices (mercedes apps, or merc mobile website will be fine). You should see that the S550 is now showing on the screen that it is "connecting" to your phone. On your phone you should see the blue bar showing that you have a live connection on the phone's "personal hotspot" - this is KEY. If you see that there is a personal hotspot connection, you know that it's your S550, and probably all is well.

If you have never paired your iPhone to the car, do that. Your phone connects to the S550 over Bluetooth, so make sure this is turned on in Settings - Bluetooth on your iPhone. "Connect Devices" from comand - search for phones and select your phone. It will negotiate a connection with your iPhone and pop up a dialog box. You'll also get one on the Comand. OK to all. You may wish to view info on the MB Bluetooth connection within the "Settings-Bluetooth" screen on the iPhone - tap the "i" with the circle around it for "info" on the connection. It might be good to turn the switches on for "Show Notifications" (good for texting functionality) and "Sync Contacts" - for phone book stuff (not related to what we are doing, but whatever).

Try that and you should be able to get internet unless your phone is messed up like mine.


My big debug results:

I just got together with my friend who has an iPhone 6+

Here are the results

His iPhone 6+ connected no problem.

His iPhone 6+ connected no problem using my sim card in his phone

My iPhone 6+ could not connect (using my sim of course)

My iPhone 6+ could not connect even when I swapped in his sim card.

This tells me that my phone hardware or something about my phone hardware and sofware is more likely to be the culprit than anything to do with my sim card.

I turned on Personal Hotspot, and my friend could connect to my personal hotspot easily, but the car could never connect to my hotspot.

If I put my sim card in my old iPhone 5S - Personal hotspot to the S55 works with no problems

I believe my S550 has a "memory" of my iPhone's Bluetooth address somewhere in memory in a bad place that is causing it to ignore my iPhone - discriminating against it on the basis of some bluetooth address memory. This is the latest theory. I have seen this before, and usually the fix would be to reboot the iPhone. (I have since thought about disconnecting the battery to the S550, but I am a bit leary of doing that haha - I think I'll get the mechanic to factory reset the comand system and ask about a hard reset of the vehicle if it's easy to try.)

I have also tried resetting network settings, forgetting the bluetooth connection, rebooting the phone - all combinations. This can also shake out the voodoo, but no good result trying those things.

I have an iPhone 6 that I don't use much - The next test will be to factory reset my iPhone 6. I think this has a good chance of fixing the problem. If it doesn't, then I will be looking to do a hard reset of the S550


SOLUTION!

How to Fix iPhone 6 Plus Bluetooth Issues
The iPhone 6 Plus does not connect to in-car entertainment and hands free systems well on iOS 8 and iOS 8.0.2. If you experience these problems the first step is to update to iOS 8.1, which fixes many iPhone 6 Plus Bluetooth problems.

If you still can’t connect to specific Bluetooth devices or accessories you may need to reset all settings. You will need to re-setup your settings, but you don’t lose data or apps. Go to Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings.


So I did this on my iPhone 6 and got it working instantly.

I expect the same result with the iPhone 6+

I really didn't want to reset all settings, but it was the next step before doing a full factory reset on the phone.


IN SUMMARY

I had Bluetooth problems that were resolved on my iPhone by resetting all settings. The end result is that I am finally able to share internet with the S550 using Personal Hotspot (Bluetooth tethering)

Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings

Then I visited Bluetooth and saw some residual Bluetooth connections and manually deleted these - I thought reset all settings would have gotten rid of all those, but I had to manually clear out about 5 mystery bluetooth devices (only hexadecimal names were shown, no friendly names).

Turned on Personal Hotspot and then paired up to the phone from the S550, then visited phone - internet ( on S550 "comand"), and got the car on the internet.

That was fun!

mwilson122

Thanks, that was awesome. I'll try this tonight. I get decent Internet speeds using T-mobile where I live (58 MB/s down, 16 MB/s up). Much better than the lame 3G speeds my car gets via its own Verizon link.

TestnDoc

Did the apps run in 4g after syncing to hotspot? I tried to connect but no success thus far.

JonMBZ

I have no experience with this but why are you using bluetooth for internet? I wouldnt think the iphone would allow it to use it's internet via bluetooth. Could you setup your wifi hotspot and just connect to it using wifi instead of bluetooth? If the iphone isnt allowing it because it's buggy maybe you can jailbreak it and use a 3rd party app like pdanet to provide tethering. Only problem is I dont know if there is one out yet for .3 :0

Buddyk

Yes is the short answer.


The Car runs it's apps through the wireless bluetooth connection - Bluetooth Tethering to the iPhone. The Car is connected to the iPhone through the iPhone's "Personal Hotspot" feature, but not through wifi, but rather through Bluetooth.

The iPhone Personal hotspot feature is typically and normally thought of as a way to share the phone's cellular internet connection to other "computers" over wifi. That is the typical "use case" - but Bluetooth tethering is another way Personal Hotspot can be accessed, and that is the way the S550 Comand system (or whatever it's called) connects to the iPhone to get internet.

My iPhone sometimes gets an "LTE" connection (depending on location of the iPhone), and other times it is "3G". LTE is the faster one and is also referred to as "4G" I believe. I can tell you that the apps load up stuff pretty fast - maybe even "snappy". I am also located in Canada and that may make a difference - not sure. Perhaps someone else can comment about the bandwidth limitations of the Bluetooth connection. I don't even know if it is Bluetooth 2.0 or Bluetooth 4 "smart". It matters. I think Bluetooth 2.0 might have more bandwidth. Bluetooth smart is more about low energy consumption for the "internet of things"

Too much jargon, and too many exceptions and too many misconceptions make what should be a simple thing to the end user seem convoluted. I think they really could kill the bugs if they just quadrupled their software and firmware engineering and made it a goal. When I say "They" I mean Merc and Apple - both of them. The car itself is as perfect a car as I have ever owned, but the entire computer side of things (comand system etc) is not good enough - at least not yet.

All it takes is someone to care and pursue the bugs. Maybe I should petition them to be head boogieman of the "comand system development".

Do the guys designing the software and human interface drive S550's daily? If they did, they would make it kick ***, right?

Buddyk

I initially thought that the iPhone "Personal Hotspot" was wifi only. I found out it is not. It has Bluetooth and USB options for sharing too. The S550 uses the Bluetooth method and that is the reason.

To answer about setting up "your wifi hotspot" - this can be done instantly and easily from any iPhone - jailbreaking is not required or desired. The problem here is bringing the S550 into the mix. For whatever reason, you cannot connect your S550 to a wifi network directly. For instance, I have my S550 in my garage right now. You'd think I would be able to have the S550 connect to my home wifi network. You cannot.

iPhone gets internet from cellular data network.

iPhone shares internet typically through wifi, but it can also do it through USB and/or Bluetooth.

It would be nice if the S550 had 2 WiFi's, but it doesn't apparently.

S550 can get internet through it's own built in "thing" - not sure what it has - I have read here that it is some 3G cell thing, and it's slow and limited or something - no idea really - just telling you what I have heard

S550 can get internet from an iPhone through Bluetooth Tethering.

Bluetooth Tethering to iPhone means the S550 uses Bluetooth to connect to the iPhone for it's internet connection.

Perhaps one cool thing is that the S550 can get internet from the iPhone using Bluetooth tethering (via the iPhone Personal Hotspot functionality), and then the S550 (can, or) could and should be able to then share it's own internet connection through it's own Wifi. It's all funnelling through the iPhone so it would be slow, but whatever, I think this would work, and in some places (countries) this would be better than nothing. But having said that, if you have an iPhone, you can also provide wifi directly and do not need to patch it through the S550. It makes me wonder what the heck Merc was thinking when they added a wifi network to the car. Why would I want to connect to the internet through the car wifi? I would only do this if there were a speed advantage, but there is actually a big disadvantage to do this if you use the 3G cell connection that is available directly through the car, and if I use my iPhone, why bother going through the car first? Just go directly.

It's similar to the strange logic of having these LCD screens in the back seat of the car - why bother. I'm glad I don't have them - any passenger can use an iPad and have the same or better functionality. I guess it's the same in first class on an airplane. They give you these movies and stuff, but you have to watch it on their dim TFT display - you do better by using your laptop or iPad. It's funny how we have layers of redundant tech going on here, but still no obvious solutions. It's like the engineers are not thinking about the end user.


Sorry if my posts are long and full of redundancies - I posted like this to eliminate ambiguities that frustrate the forum reader (like me). I think 3 letter acronyms and jargon make it hard for readers to learn. For example, I incorrectly assumed that "Personal Hotspot" was strictly "wifi". It is not. And I should know better cuz I am a bit of a computer nerd, but I assumed that's what it was, and it is not.

TestnDoc

Thanks Buddyk. I didn't realize you were in Canada. The command manual makes a distinction between USA and Canadian cars. I'm not sure we have the ability to use hotspot here in the states. Did you turn your wifi off in your command first? Or does the S550 wifi work when you are tethered to your iPhone? Thanks for your posts.

DFW_Neal

I'm a bit confused after reading this. Are we able to use the personal hotspot on the iPhone for the Internet connection in the US? I would love that to be true but I can't figure out how. I find the apps to be unusable due to the slow internet built into the car.

Radman991

I'm confused too. I have the Mercedes 3G internet activated, but tried to connect my iPhone6 as hotspot to use 4 g LTE but could not figure it out. I think it may be different in Canada.

TestnDoc

I don't we we can use iphone hotspot on our Sclass in the US.

JonMBZ

No worries man, it seems simple as hell what you want to do and you are doing a more complicated setup that is not working either. I suggest you contact mbusa and apple to see if they have some info about it. The car is new and advanced im sure it's possible with firmware updates you will get it working properly. I think the only thing hindering the vehicle is that is actually has the 3g setup so they are pushing that instead of a practical wifi sharing setup. Good luck

Buddyk

Let me be clear.

I resolved my issue connecting my S550 to my iPhone 6 personal hotspot.

Now that I have resolved it, I don't think the problem will come back again for me but it would not surprise me if others out there get into the same trouble that I had.

My Canadian S550 connects to my iPhone personal hotspot automatically now. It connects to the iPhone personal hotspot using "bluetooth tethering".


Here are my next activities I will do:

1. Someone wanted to know if the S550 can now share out the internet on it's own wifi connection after having already connected to the iPhone's personal hotspot. I'll check that. The benefits of doing this are probably limited, but that is not relevant - he just wants to know if I can do that. I'll check.


2. I will use the S550 web browser to navigate to "speedtest.net" and see if I can run a bandwidth test while I am connected to the iPhone, and the iPhone is showing LTE connection. I might also repeat it while the iPhone shows a 3G connection to see if it makes any difference. The goal of this test would be to try and compare bandwidth differences if any are present, and it might reveal if there are bottlenecks on the "bluetooth tethering" side of things. I think the Bluetooth may in fact be a bigger bottleneck that 3G/LTE. I think this test has a chance to show something real, although it would not be taking into account the cellphone internet quality. It might take several test trials in different locations near different cell towers to really know, and I probably am not that interested to do all that. Simple enough though to run a speedtest and look at the results. People talk a lot about 3G and LTE 4G - I'd like to see what real world results are.


I have no idea about Canadian vs USA S550 configurations - I know there are some quirks. I wish I had a software tool to get into the Comand system and remove all limits. But that is another topic.

iHoss

@Buddyk just wanted to thank you very much for sharing your experience with iPhone6 WiFi sharing with MB. I drive a C300-2015 (also in Canada) and have the exact issue. Before I got my iPhone6+ I was able to use internet in my C300 using HotSpot sharing on my iPhone 4. Now the Bluetooth phone and media works but internet fails to connect to my iPhone6+. I am going to try your solution hopefully it fixes my problem too. Thanks again.

Enrique Borunda

Hello there, i tried to connect my iphone 6 and nothing !! the comand display reads ( connecting to phone ) but on the phone i see the blue ( hotspot sharing line ) but it disappears after 10 seconds and the car display says ( connection nos available at the moment ). bummer

i will try your method by resentting my phone and hopefully this will work.

jaeapla

I have a new 2015 SL550, and thanks to BuddyK, I just paired my iPhone 6 to the internet on my car. My questions are: (1) I have T-Mobile, normally on Wi-Fi, so it normally shows "T-Mobile WiFi." In order to use the mobile hotspot, I had to disable WiFi. When I leave the car, the Hotspot is still enabled (even though I have re-enabled WiFi). Do I need to disable it, as my Hotspot allowance is 5gb under the plan I have, and I have no idea whether or not the Hotspot is active if it is turned on, whether or not I am using it. And (2), when I go back to the car, will I automatically be connected to the internet (the same way that I automatically reconnect to the bluetooth connection for hands-free operation). Thanks in advance for any help.

Buddyk

The answer is - It will deal with it appropriately and automatically from the iPhone. No need to do anything unusual with your wifi on your iPhone. (as far as I know).

UrBusted

I think theres something in the glovebox, which I had on my W221 to do this. Going to Mercedes later on to check it out and see what I need to do to get this if it is what I need. It does work when connected to my Samsung Galaxy S5, but it isn't that fast and it drains the battery.