Frustrating Experience

Alta Control
1

I’m just sharing my recent experience here with setting up my Route 10 and the Control. To be clear, this is in no way a criticism of either Alta Labs or its staff.

To rule out some network issues I needed to reset my network. I proceeded to follow the instructions here: Setting Up the Control and Route10 – Alta Labs. After getting the Route 10 connected to the internet and verifying connectivity to Google, I followed the steps to get the Control up and running.

No matter what I did, I could not get the activation email and even using the app on my phone wouldn’t work. Only After calling support and being advised to connect my AP6 Pro to the Route 10 and using Wi-Fi, was I able to get the activation email. The Route 10 was detected and after setting it up, I found it showing as disconnected.

Getting really frustrated, I repeated the documented process even using my phone with an ethernet adapter. With Wi-Fi and data disabled and verifying internet access, I still could not get the email. The only way to get the activation email was through Wi-Fi.

There really needs to be a better way of doing this. Relying on an email only for activation doesn’t seem to be in my opinion, the wisest of choices. Spending hours to get something working that really shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes maximum isn’t the greatest experience. The hardware is great and the customer support is fantastic, but this Achillies heel, not so much.

2

Thanks for taking the time to offer some candid feedback. In our efforts to maximize security, we have opted to require email-based activation for every account that is created, whether that is on a local controller, or in the cloud. We realize that this may add an extra step, that not all email services are created equally, and spam filters can be very difficult to work with.

However, we believe that the added security is worth the trouble, and hope that it’s a small speed bump that you only need to deal with very infrequently, if even only once.

3

Thank you for your response. While I have no issue with the security aspect or taking the extra step, It’s the fact that the email isn’t even being received. If it was actually being received and in the spam folder, that wouldn’t be an issue.

Respectfully, I wouldn’t necessarily agree with spending several hours trying to get it to work, as being a “small speed bump”. If I have an internet connection, then I should be receiving an email 100% of the time. Again, I’m not trying to criticize, I’m trying to understand why I’m having to use Wi-Fi to receive the email.

4

I’m happy to work with you to understand why the email had such difficulty getting to your inbox, to see if there’s any way we can improve there. Who is your email provider? I can search our cloud logs if you send me your email address. I’ll reach out to you directly for that.