I am more than ever convinced .... Sailfish network woes

General
#1

Having spent the last three days working in London I was staying in a top floor hotel room at the end of a corridor run. As a result the hotel wifi sometimes was there and sometimes wasn’t - so my phone spent its time regularly switching between the hotel wifi and a 4G, or sometimes 3G connection.

The resulting impact on my SFOS XA2 running 4.1 was a complete disaster. Exchange email regularly stopped synchronising, network connectivity regularly disappeared on Android apps (e.g. Whatsapp, MS Teams, etc) the browser just hung for pretty much every website I tried to visit. My news apps (Tidings, Kactus) simply refused to load news articles or errored 50% of the time and the battery drained away faster than a politician’s integrity (presumably because the phone was constantly hunting for the best network connection).

I ended up needing to reboot the phone 7 or 8 times a day (which always fixed the connection issue temporarily) to get anything done on it. I got so frustrated I nearly threw the thing out of the window to see if it would reach its terminal velocity before it hit the ground. I ended up switching wifi off and limiting the mobile connectivity to ‘Prefer 3G’ to get any use out of the phone at all - which was great until I ran out of data due to too many Zoom calls.

I’m back home now with my new strong wifi connection and it seems like I have a totally re-born phone. Exchange email is regularly synchronising without issue, my Android apps have a network connection again, my messages are coming through on Whatsapp and I can read the news without issue. The whole user experience is smooth and productive.

I am therefore more than ever convinced that a lot of the connectivity/synchronisation issues and bugs that are listed on this forum are down to the way that Sailfish handles (or doesn’t) the switching between network protocols and how such switching is presented to applications, such as Exchange email, which then either timeout or are simply left hanging or whatever.

Fixing these network problems (whatever their technical reason or origin) would make a huge difference in the reliability of Sailfish as trusted daily driver … or perhaps somebody will tell me that these issues re fixed in 4.2?

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#2

Not really helpful but another confirmation (even in totally different direction):
https://together.jolla.com/question/225150/bug-or-feature-cellular-data-activatedpreferred-while-wlanwifi-is-enabledin-use/

And follow the link in first post and you will find a feature request from 2015…

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#3

I find that (in general, not SFOS specifically) in such situations a VPN can help.
Set it up so that it reconnects indefinitely , and have long timeout values.
This way the apps should just see one bad connection but not network changes.

I haven’t tried this with SFOS though, maybe it wouldn’t help, maybe it would.

(Oh and completely unrelated, I really miss the “access point” concept the Symbian S60 phones had)

#4

Vodafone Germany on X10 here. I can confirm what OP says. Switching from Wifi to mobile network is errorneous especially (but not only) for Android apps on Sailfish. The culprit is always the transition from a Wifi to mobile network (vice versa is quite reliable).
Manually switching off Wifi in such a situation makes it worse for me. Apps rather seem to accept the transition to mobile connection when wifi is “on” (but not connected). VPN connection adds a layer of complexity. Switching networks then (in any direction) is just gambling.

#5

Switching between WLAN and mobile network leads to change your IP address, with what you connect to your services with what you want to work. So the server (e.g. MS Teams) sees you login twice from different IP addresses. You never logout regular before loosing WLAN connection, it simply happens. Then your phone tries over the mobile net to connect with your cloudserver, but request comes now from another IP address. Good servers do not allow this, for protection against hacking your account.

If you have no stable WLAN in some place, I would recommend to use mobile network permanently OR buy a WLAN range extender, put it in a place with acceptable reception quality in the hotel room. If you then log in into the WLAN repeaters WLAN you can move around free in the room, because phone receives only the repeater with few meter distance. So no interruption from moving the phone.

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#6

I think to cope with that “Mobile IP” was specified, but AFAIK unfortunately never implemented widely.
(MIPv4 RFC 5944, MIPv6 RFC 6275, Proxy Mobile IPv6 RFC RFC 5213 (together with RFC 6543 and 7864)
Or am I wrong and all of that is already used somehow by default in the background under certain conditions?

#7

Whilst, in this (my hotel) particular case, Sailfish could not cope with the situation, my daily driver iPhone had no problems whatsoever with coping with transitions between wifi and mobile (and vice versa), and nor did my wife’s Android phone - so I still remain convinced that this is a Sailfish problem just begging to be fixed.

I do actually make a habit of turning wifi off when I leave the house and turning mobile off and wifi back on again when I return home as its the only way I can get Exchange email to sync reliably without having to do multiple phone reboots everyday. But this is 2021 and I shouldn’t really have to micromanage my phone’s network configuration multiple times throughout the day - its just a huge pain and a real turn-off for SFOS as a potential daily driver :disappointed:.

#8

Are you on SFOS 4.1 ?
If you activate ‘early access’ in your Jolla account you can have SFOS 4.2.0.19 right now, and try if it’s better. Until the final release is available to all users it’ll need a few days.

#9

Yes, I am on 4.1 - and I intend to stay there until 4.2 comes out properly with all (!) of its early teething troubles fixed. My idea is to let all you tech experts suffer the pain with the Sailfish early access versions and then jump onto the next release (or not) when the general consensus is that it has fixed more of the critical issues than it has introduced.

Whereas I happily will download the next ios version for my iPhone without any fear that it will break something that is essential to me, with Sailfish this is often a marginal judgement call as I am sure many will understand - a case of ‘look before you leap’!

And since you can’t downgrade the OS without yet another total reflash of the OS and restoration of all your data that makes it an even more considered decision to leap to the next version.

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#10

That’s a good idea! This update time, it seems for me (felt) an extra long time from the early access release till the final release comes. So I’m sure there will be a lot of bugfixes in the final release and it will be much better than the early access release.
Please consider that you have a very new phone model. With a brand-new model there are always more bugs in SFOS. The bug problem will be better in future!

#11

The XA2 is a brand-new model? By which criteria? If I understand correctly, it’s the oldest model that still has first-class support from Jolla with Android (the X is stuck with an older version of Aliendalvik and won’t get updates).

#12

oh no, @Steve_Everett 's Xperia 10 II is a brand-new model, not the XA2!

About SFOS 4.2.0.19 @ XA2 I don’t know anything.

#13

I have an XA2, not an Xperia 10 II, and it will be coming up to its 4th birthday in a few months time.

The Xperia 10 ii is far too big for me and the 64 bit version of Sailfish is even more flaky on this in my opinion than on the much older XA2 - so I definitely won’t be making the jump to this until it is much more stable, perhaps in the next decade or so - if I live that long that is :wink:

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#14

So to say: soon ™ :innocent:

#15

I’ve got the Xperia 10 II and when it had Android, none of these problems happened. It’s now that I have flashed it with Sailfish that the connection drops like @Steve_Everett described. This makes me think it might be a problem exclusive to Sailfish (or that other OS have found workarounds to this issue that work better than the ones SFOS has implemented)

#16

maybe network switching is just too slow with SFOS.

#17

Oh, sorry, I totally misunderstood something… (regarding to your phone model)

#18

I have the same problem on the XA2 and XA2+ for a long time. Also it doesn’t automatically find wifi networks that have been previously subscribed to.

#19

My WIFI also forgets manual configs of access points, if there is more than one access point configured. With only one, it works.

#20

Absolutely no problem at all :grinning:

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