There are strange things afoot in Beantown, and for once the chaos isn’t related to massive government transit projects or the general layout of its street grid. Navigating Boston can be tricky on a good day, but folks who rely on Apple CarPlay (or Android Auto, apparently) have it even tougher thanks to a collection of mysterious dead zones that have left local drivers thoroughly stumped, Axios Boston reports.
What these users are describing isn’t the usual urban signal blackout usually attributed to tall buildings or thick barriers made with metal components that can act like a giant Faraday cage. Instead, users report that the local WiFi connection that pairs the phone with the onboard software is giving out, disconnecting their phones from their cars despite leaving their actual cell service intact.
Axios managed to throw together a map based on crowdsourced reports from local drivers, narrowing them down to four concentrated dead zones. Two are on Soldiers Field Road abutting the Harvard campus (one just south of the Eliot Bridge; another just to the east of it). A third impacts drivers near the intersection of Brookline and Riverway near Fenway Park, and the fourth is near the Hatch Shell on Storrow.
Boston is no stranger to curses, but whatever is afflicting these smartphone users is likely a man-made phenomenon, at least according to the few experts who have observed it and bothered to chime in. Other devices operating in the same wireless frequency band can cause interference, and with enough of it, even devices just inches from each other may lose their connection. Some social media users pointed to TV station WBZ’s antenna array near the intersection of Soldiers Field and Everett; others suggested that a 2.4Ghz point-to-point microwave communication system employed by one of the nearby universities may produce a similar result.
And this is not unique to Boston. In fact, I repeatedly experienced the same thing in a rural North Carolina town. A seemingly innocuous block of surface street played havoc with the Android Auto and Apple CarPlay connections in multiple current GM products, leaving both myself and several other journalists similarly puzzled—and we didn’t have M.I.T. geeks nearby to blame for it.
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Byron is one of those weird car people who has never owned an automatic transmission. Born in the DMV but Midwestern at heart, he lives outside of Detroit with his wife, two cats, a Miata, a Wrangler, and a Blackwing.
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