Hi,
sync speed is a very mixed bag for me. A rough guess for me is:
- 5% of my runs will upload very fast (the instant I am home, I am still taking off my shoes)
- 65% of my runs will upload reasonably fast, say within 3-5 minutes of arriving home
- 30% of my runs, will take even longer than 5 minutes to upload, making me grab my phone and try to initiate a sync via garmin connect, waiting annother 5 mins etc. - these are often the really long activites, where I assume there is lots of data to transfer.
I have WiFi and Bluetooth enabled - when I get home that should mean the watch will (eventually) find both my phone and my WiFi, which is probably the most common scenario out there (at least for people that took the time to add their home WiFi to the watch).
Since I do have WiFi enabled I would expect uploads to be almost instantanous, as they are in rare cases (the 5%). My guess is that the watch finds the phone before it finds the WiFi, and then doesn't use the WiFi, but defaults to Bluetooth - and that is not the fastest. I know that if I go through the watch menu to trigger a WiFi sync, it will say a sync is already in progress [via bluetooth?]. A different theory is that the watch doesn't check for WiFi very often, e.g. if I end my activity infront of my home it might check once, but not find WiFi out there, then not try again a few minutes later when I have walked inside.
My suggestion: To make fast uploads more consistent it would be great if the watch would prioritize WiFi when available. Keep searching for the WiFi even if there is a phone around, and use it once found! I could even imagine trying both avenues (uploading the activity through bluetooth and WiFi simultanously) and making sure on the backend that some kind of duplicate detection will discard the slower one.
One thing I have considered but not tested yet is to disable bluetooth on my phone (prior to going out for the run), and checking how fast syncs are when there is no phone. Will try this and post about it.
Edit: It seems to be possible to force a WiFi Sync by turning off the phones blue-tooth capabilities before hitting "Save" on the activity. A crude workaround, but definetly has improved my sync times by a lot. Garmin, can you patch it so the watch switched to WiFi once it becomes available provided bluetooth sync did not complete yet?
Edit2: Maybe an easier method is to disable the bluetooth connection to the phone via the watch menu. So far having great success by doing:
- At end of run, stop the run, but do not save yet
- Long press top left (light) button to enter the circular icon menu
- Find phone connection icon and hit that - phone connection will turn off
- Go "back" to return to your save activity screen, hit save
- Optional: If you do not have automatic sync via WiFi enabled or are not in WiFi range at this point, you can revisit the circular icon menu and request a sync
- Once you get the message that sync was complete, which only takes a few seconds for me, go back to the circular icon menu and re-enable the phone connection. Keeping it off permanently is probably not a good idea for most people as it is used for many features.
Edit3: Sadly, WiFi Sync does not seem to work on large workouts. Large seems to be 4h+ activities for me (and I have 1s recording of points enabled). We are talking slightly above 1MB file size here [of the uncompressed .fit], should be an absolute joke, but I think it is the size that is the problem (maybe the barrier is exactly 1mb?)
