iPhone Tethering: mine is pretty slow, how’s yours?
By Ben Robinson on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 1:14 PM PST In Mobile Broadband, O2
I recently enabled iPhone Tethering, and was expecting it to solve my problems of having to use a separate mobile broadband dongle – since it does the same thing. However, I ran in to two problems:
- poor network coverage where I’ve been travelling to
- the initial connection of the iPhone to the network for data seems slow and unreliable
Now of course the first of these problems is purely network-related – in this case O2 (NYSE: TEF). But the second of these problems is a funny one – the iPhone appears to pick up the tethering to the MacBook very quickly, but data rates you get once you key in say a website are very low indeed. This is in both areas of good and bad coverage, and trying it out I’ve been able to compare it with a dedicated O2 broadband dongle (by Huawei as it happens). The dongle outperforms the iPhone every time actually, both with speed of connection to the network, and then data rates.
Having said all of this, I’m not the biggest fan of the iPhone when it’s connecting to the network by itself with it’s Mail client, or Safari – whether on EDGE or 3G, it does seem to take a while to get that initial burst of data through. So what’s the problem?
Well it’s either the iPhone software stack responsible for connecting to the network, or it’s the network itself not providing resource in a simple fashion for the iPhone to connect to. Which exactly I can’t say for sure, but I’m sure other devices I’ve had on O2 have been quicker to the punch as regards data.
What are your experiences with the iPhone and it’s data connection to (various) networks? I’m keen to hear if any of you have a better time of things!
I found your post and I have exactly the same problem.
I did some tests today, in each case I perform three speed tests in a row using the Ookla app on the iPhone. More importantly, when tethering, I run a network activity monitor on my computer to check that I’m not swamping the connection (apart from the occasional small burst there is no network activity).
Without tethering: speed = 600-1800kbps
with tethering: speed = 60-70kbps
without tethering (but just after unplugging the phone): speed = 60-100kbps
without tethering (just after the above, but having turned on flight mode for 5s): speed = 600-1200kbps
… repeat …
They have to be throttling the connection. I can think of no other reason
Hi,
I have had a similar problem I spoke to O2 about it and they had me try several things . Once was to go and sit in an O2 shop that has its own tower, this produced no difference to me tethered or not.
Although I have also found since upgrading to 3.1 that I also get phone lock ups needing a hard reset and a consistant rate change from 3g to Edge to nothing then back, yet never get this when using an app on the phone.
So could it be more to do with the tethering app being very poor?
Hi.
Sorry to hear that I am not the only one with this problem. I live in Sweden and commute back and forth to Denmark on a daily basis.
I used to use a Huawei 3G dongle with great success; I was able to reliably connect to the company using OpenVPN during my 1h train ride to work. Now I convinced by boss to “upgrade” to an iPhone to get both a new phone and to hand back the 3G dongle to the company (it is shared among multiple employees). The last days I have been trying to use my new iPhone as a replacement of the dongle – and the experience is very disappointing; the VPN connection is very unstable and the connection appears to be slow. I can browse the web, but not do any real work (emails, VNC etc). I wonder what is wrong…
Regards