11

In my area, my home Internet will often go down due to storms. At these times, I need to tether using my 4G LTE mobile phone, which gets decent speeds of around 10 Mb/s for download and similar for upload.

While USB tethering, my download speeds on my laptop are constantly very slow, typically around 0.2 to 0.3 Mb/s. However, if I tether via Wi-Fi my download speeds are about the same as the speeds on my phone itself (around 10 Mb/s).

I have compared speeds hundreds of time using SpeedTest.net. On my phone I use the SpeedTest.net Android app.

I have been with my mobile provider for many years; this problem started 1.5 years ago and nobody at the mobile provider has been able to help. The problem happened with all the phones I have owned during this time (several LG and Samsung devices) with all the different computers (both laptops and desktops) and the pattern is always the same.

How can I find out if this is throttling by the carrier in response to USB tethering or if this is a problem with my computer configuration related to USB tethering. Most of my computers run Linux and there isn't really much configuration needed because USB tethering "just works". However, I suspect there may be configuration options I could investigate but which I am unaware of.

Giacomo1968
  • 58,727
MountainX
  • 2,214

2 Answers2

2

Your operators might limit your speed based on detecting the number of middle hops in your TCP connection. Using the following command, you will be able to check your TTL (Time to leave) value while using USB tethering vs WIFI tethering.

ping -c 5 google.com | grep ttl

If there is a difference, you can change the default TTL of your USB connection using the following command:

sudo iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -j TTL --ttl-set 65

(Use the needed number instead of 65 in the above command.)

Giacomo1968
  • 58,727
Ali Khakbaz
  • 1,057
0

You could find out if this is your carrier or not by trying to setup some dummy TCP service on your Linux machine and connecting to it on your phone to see the throughput via Wi-Fi vs USB.

Giacomo1968
  • 58,727
Marcel Klehr
  • 101
  • 1