Bluetooth Tethering vs Wifi Tethering

[gmoonit]

Thank you all Android Nexus 7 people -- you're awesome. Now, I looked elsewhere but could not find a lot of information, sorry of this is a repost.

I have a Droid Bionic, I pay for the wifi hotspot, and have 4G all the time -- so I like my speed, you know?

When I tether my Nexus 7 via bluetooth it is slow (by my standards), i'm talking 1353 kilobits (169 kilobytes, 1.36 megabits) / s...

I am used to getting 20+ megabits (25,000 kilobits, 2.5 megabytes) / second.

1.36 megabits is too slow for me to watch HD video, not even enough to listen to my pandora in high quality.

So -- is this a bluetooth speed limitation or is my connection bad? Because when I connect the nexus 7 to the droid bionic hotspot on wifi my speed is awesome.

Thanks everyone for responding.

 

[jerrykur]

Depending on the version of BT that they implement on the phone your data rates over BT only can run up to 2.1 mbps. Read through the following for the details, Bluetooth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[crowrb29]

I would recommend the hotspot. I have adverse results from using bt tether. It doesn't work with a lot of things that the WiFi tether does. In fact WiFi tether gives you all the same opportunities you would have using a router from a brick and mortar WiFi hotspot. Just from my experience it seems like a lot of BT tether stuff is broken. Your phone seems to be rootable as well http://droidbionicroot.com/ and with root you can get unlimited free WiFi tether no matter your phone plan so its definitely worth at least a look. I love everything about being rooted, and after you do it once it sort of gets addictive.

Sent from my EVO using Android Central Forums

 

[gmoonit]

Yeah, @ crowrb29... I feel bad getting the "free" hotspot, I use 100 gigabytes + / month (NO JOKE), and i get a 16% discount with verizon for the company I work for, so, no big deal. I'm also afraid of rooting, but may give a shot after seeing that website, thanks
Anyway, after a little further research (thank you jerrykur) I found out my droid bionic has bluetooth 2.1 which is limited to a data transfer rate of ~ 2 megabits/second.
so... the limiting factor is the bluetooth standard on my droid bionic. The Nexus 7 has bluetooth 3.0 - with a throughput of up to 24 megabits/second.

The only reason I wanted the bluetooth was to save battery power, but I have many external batteries I can use (check this out), so I think i'll be okay sticking with the WiFi HotSpot.

 

[Ayrow]

I have been experimenting with this like crazy. The savings in battery power are too hard to ignore. The hardest part was finding a way to Bluetooth tether with an unrooted Moto X on Kit Kat ( unlimited Verizon plan). It has been a nightmare, but I was finally able to do it using FOXFI.
Sadly, the speeds are dismal. 795 kbps isn't really fast enough to do much.