Tethering from my phone to my laptop is incredibly slow

sophlowe45

When i first started tethering from my phone to my laptop it was fine, decent speed. After a few weeks it became super slow, it was fine again for a few days and then went back to being super slow for the last few weeks.

I connect via the wifi hotspot, at first USB tethering did not work, then worked for a few weeks, but then stopped working.

The internet is fine on my phone but extremely slow on my laptop.

I have a Mac 10.6.8 (latest updates installed).

HTC Incredible Android 4.0.4 (latest updates installed).

Bluetooth I turn Bluetooth on laptop and phone (discoverable) go to set up bluetooth device but it does not find my phone.

I am with Three One plan so I have unlimited internet and tethering is allowed so I don't understand why it is so slow on my laptop but fine on my phone. I live in London where Three signal is meant to be good (but I found o2 reception to be much better).

Yesterday I downloaded some apps to try and help but they do not help at all. I am thinking of deleting them. Open Garden and another one.

What can I do to improve tethering speeds?

I keep restarting my phone and laptop, I even renamed the wifi hotspot and changed the password, makes no difference.

sophlowe45

Clockworkmod tether was the other one. I could download it on my phone. but then I had to download it on my laptop too but got an error message when trying to install it. I deleted the download and downloaded it again but got the same error message so I could not try using this app.

sophlowe45

The speed was ok at a friends house who lives 10 minutes away, took 30 mins of waiting before we could steam a 45 minute show and websites were loading ok, not super fast but at an ok speed.

RobTang

TBH I've tried tethering / wifi hotspot on multiple phones (S3, S4, iPhone 5, few win phones) all are universally terrible and offer the worst performance and frankly would only use if I had no other choice.

The mifi devices were better performance was acceptable (5-10mbps EE4G), however battery life was useless.

Best was a dongle direct into the PC (15-20mbps EE4G)

Stooby2

It can depend on a number of things and living in London, you'll find the time of day can make a difference. You're getting your data presumably by 3g+ or "H" but the signal constantly varies as you're no doubt aware. If the signal degrades to "G" or even "E" it's going to slow down a lot, even it's only for a few seconds.

Different rooms in your house will have differing signal levels. In my front room I get full 5 bars and "H" level data. Move to the back room and the signal drops to 1-2 and data swaps almost constantly between G, 3G and H (on different phones and networks).

Then there's the matter of how many people are using the same cell as you are and in London that could be dozens, if not hundreds - which again will slow down the connection. I used to work in Southwark and at lunchtimes, data would almost grind to a halt as everyone tries to update Facebook, Skype, Twitter etc. Then again after 5pm it would slow down again.