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I'm using an HTC Desire HD to create a portable wifi hotspot on a 2G connection (yes, I know, but its all I got sometimes) so I can use my laptop for simple internet based tasks. My 2G connection on the phone seems to max out at about 40kbps (unrelated, but is this normal?). However, the connection is pretty much unusable by my laptop which seems to gain a maximum of about 300 bytes/sec download speed (strangely though, it gets almost 4kbps upload).

So, 1) Any idea what's wrong? 2) If the phone's 2g connection is capable of 40kpbs, is it reasonable to expect a portable wifi hotspot client to be able to use all of this capacity?

Thanks!

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  • 40 kbps is fast enough to load the full facebook.com in about a minute. Is that even worth it?
    – Matthew Read
    Feb 11, 2011 at 23:23
  • :) indeed not for any normal browsing, but then I only need it to send emails and other light http communication when I'm travelling which I prefer to use my laptop for.
    – Chris Knight
    Feb 11, 2011 at 23:43

2 Answers 2

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In theory you should get full speed but this things can be dodgy sometimes. Make sure you make these speedtests at the same spot and at the same time to avoid congestion and diffrent signal strenghts effecting the test.

You can try USB tethering and see if the speed improves. If you can't find usb tethering in settings there are apps that should allow you to try this.

You can also try to put the phone to a better spot (signal wise) when using the wifi tether.

On an unrelated note, please try to be more precise when using units such as kbps. You used bits 3 times and byte once. A small(normal) b means a bit and a large(capital) B a Byte. One Byte is 8 bits. 40 kbps (kilo bits per seconds) is 5kB/s(kilo bytes per seconds). Please do the tests again and edit your question with the correct numbers with correct units or post in a comment.

It is also possible that your computer is doing some stuff (such as cheking for windows updates or antivirus definitions) that might effect your speedtest. Also the compter might show the results in a diffent unit than your phone, so the numbers are smaller but the speed is the same.

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No, this does not seems to be normal. When I use my phone for tethering I get the full 100% speed my phone is normally capable of. Maybe you network supplier is slowing down the connection or the tethering isnt working all that great.

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  • Or the provider doesn't like tethering and thus limits the speed.
    – Izzy ♦
    Aug 8, 2012 at 16:31

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