Well, I’ve been doing some more investigation and come to the conclusion that emporia has some bugs in their tcp network stack. Their wifi radio appears to need pretty good signal strength or it tends to drop packets. These dropped packets manifests itself in missed pings and also results in retransmissions of the secure MQTT protocol that they appear to use. Normally, this runs over lossless tcp protocol and the underlying stack should take care of the retransmissions. But when tcp packets are lost, I can see in the packet analyzer that they are attempting retransmissions but they apparently never get back in sync and this causes the hangup and loss of data. Normally, when occasional packets are lost, the tcp protocol takes care of it and although updates may slow down a bit due to retransmission, it should never stop working like emporia does.
So, if you have a good wifi signal and never loose any packets, you may never see this problem, but if you have a weaker wifi signal and get periodic (though normally acceptable) data losses, you are more likely to see these problems.
As for myself, by repositioning the wifi antenna, I was able to get a stronger signal and this eliminated the dropped packets and the subsequent no data state. But Emporia needs to fix their stack as it should be able to suffer minor packet losses without issue.
