Always-on Wi-Fi

Always-on Wi-Fi keeps your dashcam connected to one designated network wherever the vehicle goes. Pick the network your car already carries, usually a phone hotspot or the car’s built-in Wi-Fi, and the camera stops waiting until you get home before it talks to the cloud.

The feature is a cloud-settings option: it appears on the device settings page after your device is set up, and it is not part of the setup wizard. Your camera picks the saved configuration up the next time it boots or checks in, like every settings change.

What it does

With always-on Wi-Fi enabled, the camera keeps its Wi-Fi on and keeps trying to connect to the network you picked, even away from your home zones. While the link is up:

Live tracking. The dashboard shows where the vehicle is, updated every few seconds, plus a Driving status while you are moving.
Live view. Anyone you allow can open a live view of the camera while you drive.
Remote access. Settings changes and software updates reach the camera without waiting for it to come home.

Backing up footage on the road

On its own, the always-on link carries tracking and remote access, which use almost no data. Footage uploads only happen inside your home zones, exactly as before. If you want backups on the road too, choose a backup mode:

No footage uploads. Tracking and live view only. The default.
Locked videos only. Incident clips upload to the cloud as soon as they are recorded. An incident clip that finishes uploading shows a QR code on the camera’s screen linking straight to the clip on your dashboard. This is the mode most people want: your evidence is safe within minutes, wherever you are.
All videos. Everything uploads, all the time. Rideshare drivers, couriers, and anyone who needs every mile on file the moment it is recorded.

If your footage at home is clutter you do not need (surveillance cameras already cover it, say), the home zones page has a setting to keep clips recorded inside a zone from uploading at all: Clips recorded inside my home zone.

Trips themselves upload once a drive ends, and the cloud stitches your clips into the trip, so a trip appears complete even when its clips uploaded mid-drive.

The home zone exception

Tick Do not connect to the always-on network when I’m in a home zone and the camera drops the hotspot link whenever it is inside one of your home zones. Your home or office Wi-Fi carries the uploads there, and the hotspot’s mobile data is saved for the road. This is on by default behaviour-wise for most people: connect at home to what is already there, connect everywhere else to what follows the car.

One consequence trips people up: with this on, the camera will never join the hotspot while it is inside a home zone. Testing the feature from your driveway looks like the hotspot never connects, when in fact the camera is deliberately staying off it. Drive a few hundred metres out of the zone and the first connection attempt happens within seconds.

When it does not connect

The camera tries the network you picked every few seconds at first, then backs off to every five minutes while it keeps failing. When a hotspot never connects, the banner above your recent trips says so, naming the network, when the camera last tried, and why the attempt failed. Things worth checking:

Is the hotspot actually on, and is the phone within Wi-Fi range of the car?
Does the hotspot run WPA3-only? Most phones offer a “maximize compatibility” toggle that adds WPA2; either works with current camera software, but older firmware only speaks WPA2.
Is the hotspot on 5 GHz? Some phones default to it. Switching the hotspot to 2.4 GHz reaches further inside a car park or garage.
Settings changes, including this feature itself, reach the camera at its next check-in: at least once a day, whenever it can reach one of your saved networks. Enabling always-on Wi-Fi at home does not connect the hotspot instantly; the camera picks the change up first and starts trying right after.

Use cases

A parent with a teenage driver. Enable always-on Wi-Fi on the car’s hotspot with No footage uploads. Open the dashboard any time and see where the car is, whether it is moving, and when it last reported. A harsh brake locks the clip on the camera; switch the backup mode to Locked videos only, and the next incident clip reaches the cloud minutes after it happens, with a QR code on the camera’s screen to open it instantly.

A courier fleet. Every van carries a hotspot. Enable Locked videos only and each delivery incident is off the SD card and in the cloud before the driver reaches the next stop. Back at the depot, the home-zone exception hands uploads to the depot Wi-Fi so the hotspots do not carry the day’s full footage.

A rideshare driver. Enable All videos and never think about the SD card again. Every mile uploads as you drive. Expect serious mobile data usage, so use an unlimited or high-capacity plan.

Changing the network

The always-on network must be one of the networks on this device, because the camera can only stay linked to a network it holds the password for. If you remove the network from the device’s list, the always-on pick resets and the feature waits until you choose another one.

Manage the list of candidate networks on the Wi-Fi networks page.