Downloading map takes a very long time

snow*

Egika

Race S, Vertical 1 have a slower processor than Vertical 2.
My Vertical 2 is also loading maps way faster than my Vertical 1.

Since you do this only once a year or so, I think it does not really matter. Just leave the watch on the charger over night and it will be done.

Goatee

@larrybbaker I’m sure someone else said about Scotland being a really long download too
I had the phone & watch on charge
Race S
Samsung S25 Ultra
Android Suunto beta app

suzzlo

In my experience, it takes too much time (hours).
There is a bottleneck somewhere, and it’s not the internet connection or router, since the offline maps for suunto app takes minutes or seconds.

Perhaps it’s the watch procesor, memory… i think the slow item in this chain is the watch

larrybbaker

@suzzlo watch being the bottleneck makes sense. I did go ahead and test my V1 with the Scotland map download and it took just under an hour. So I still think there is more to it than the watch.

Tieutieu

This map update took sooo long also on my SRs (around 8-9 hours for whole France)
It has been noticeably faster to perform it on my SV1 (I would say around 20/30% faster - even it’s still long).
High speed WiFi, watch on charge less to 1meter from internet box

muurain

Our household has a Race S and a Race 2 and to me they both feel equally slow on downloads. On average about 15min for ~250MB of download. So about 2.2Mbps.

The router reports the devices do get a 72.2Mbps wifi connection (2.4GHz/20MHz/1x1), but even with that they only ever use at maximum 5Mbps. My work macbook can pull close to 1Gbps from internet using the same router and internet connection using wifi 6.

So my guess is there is something in the watch or Suunto’s cloud service that throttles the downloads.
Its a small device so I kinda get how the hardware just might not keep up with a large download and the computing related it. I doubt anyone has a broadband connection this slow.

But the speed is also really dependant about the wifi strength. Even though a router might first show a faster link, any movement and distance from the router during the download will kill the download speeds. I found that the best speed was within a 1-3m radius of our router with a line of sight between router and the watch.

Also 2.4GHz wifi band is often crowded, so your beighbours wifi usage might also interfere with the connection.

snow*

@muurain said in Downloading map takes a very long time:

Suunto’s cloud service that throttles the downloads.

Fair

suzzlo

@muurain said in Downloading map takes a very long time:

Suunto’s cloud service that throttles the downloads

but… you can download maps for the mobile phone that are much faster… so… if we think, same server is delivering them… this should not be the problem…

Anyway, I can live with it

Egika

@snow said in Downloading map takes a very long time:

@muurain said in Downloading map takes a very long time:

Suunto’s cloud service that throttles the downloads.

Fair

they don’t

I think it has been mentioned when maps download was introduced, that the watches processing speed is the limiting factor here.
So, yes. It is slow and always has been slow.
While newer watches are a little faster.
The watch processors are selected to consume as little energy as possible for long battery life.
Thus they can handle the data transfer and unpacking only slowly.
As it is only required a single time, it should not really matter.

muurain

@suzzlo said in Downloading map takes a very long time:

@muurain said in Downloading map takes a very long time:

Suunto’s cloud service that throttles the downloads

but… you can download maps for the mobile phone that are much faster… so… if we think, same server is delivering them… this should not be the problem…

Anyway, I can live with it

You’re right! I didn’t even realize that, even though I did download mobile maps too

And yeah this does seem like an understandable constraint of small smart devices.

I too am happy to have the convenience of WiFi downloads, even if they are pretty slow compared to bigger devices. My old Garmin Fenix maps downloaded way faster, but it was via USB cable and a PC.

But given the analysis here, the original post does now sound like a WiFi issue or a bug.
Maybe try downloading maps on some other place or WiFi…?

If the download speed is considerably less than 1GB / hour (or ~2Mbps), it should work faster and there are not many broadbands this slow.