Mobile Hotspot speed is slow

[Casey Cheung]

I have unlimited data on my S9 through Verizon. When I turn on"Mobile Hotspot" and connect to my various devices via wifi (eg: Samsung tablet, Sony Windows laptop, etc), the internet speed on these other devices seems pretty slow. Granted, my Samsung tablet and Windows laptop are more than a few years old, is this normal? Is Verizon throttling down my Mobile Hotspot speed?

 

[pkcable]

Some carriers do throttle hotspot, and/or limit the speed. Not sure if Verizon does, but I know T-Mobile does depending on your plan. The devices can also be a source of the problem, and of course the fact that it's a wireless connection can be an issue.

 

[Casey Cheung]

Here is an example. I turned on my Mobile Hotspot on my Samsung S9 which provided a wifi signal to my old Samsung Note 4 phone. Using the Note 4 phone, I downloaded Asphalt 9 racing game. It literally took 5 hours to download this large game that is about 2 GB in size using Mobile Hotspot through my S9.

When I went to a local coffee shop with free wifi, I downloaded the same Asphalt 9 racing game onto my S9 phone using the coffee shop's free wifi, which only took only about 15 minutes to download. Granted this is not a direct/fair comparison, but still, why 5 hours to download the game using my Verizon Mobile Hotspot?

 

[B. Diddy]

How much tethering have you done this month? Does Verizon have a tethering limit per month? If so, and if you've exceeded that limit, the tethering speed might be severely throttled, as pkcable suggested.

 

[pkcable]

Definitely sounds like carrier throttling. Googling around, it appears that Verizon throttles down to 600m once you exceed 15GB of hotspot.

 

[Casey Cheung]

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I did a Google search and found lots of unhappy Verizon customers complaining about this same topic on the Verizon chat forum:

https://community.verizonwireless.com/t5/My-Verizon/Bandwidth-throttling-way-too-severe/td-p/1053462