Why is my mobile hotspot so much slower than my regular data connection?

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.

When I first signed up with t-mobile, tethering was provided at full speed. Since maybe 4 months ago, it seems that t-mobile has made it slow to sometimes unusable. Have no idea what to do...

I had this same issue with both my iPhone 6s plus, and my OnePlus 7 Pro. I called the 611 support and was transferred to a technician who informed me that the person who added the Pro plan to my account that adds the 20gb of LTE hotspot hadn't been synced up properly. They had my shut down each phone, then they did something on their end and I then turned the phone back on and connected my laptop to the tether or hotspot wifi. Before I added the 20gb plan, I was getting .20-.30 Mbps on tether, and the exact same after getting the 20gb plan. But after the technician did their magic while I talked to them, I was pulling 75mbps on tether for both devices. I hope this helps someone, even though it seems ridiculously simple, there is some nonsense syncing issue that the technician can fix really easily over the phone. Good luck

Tmobile use any gimmick they could to move you over to their Tmobile one plan, Last year including a simple upgrade, line changes or anything. 

hollywoodsign1932 wrote:

T-mobile customer service  me around with this . The device hot spot was CLEARLY very quick and reliable months ago. Now it is USELESS! So slow, in fact, that I cannot even load the gmail in under ten minutes on my Chromebook or laptop. The devices are fine on other networks. The phone web service is fast. But the hot spot is ridiculously slow now. 
 

They offered NO solutions other than to try and sell me another plane--with a limited bandwidth of 4g hot spot. So, T-mobile can go itself in it's . 

you too?

the service repair individual was as helpful as the newbie that sold me the device initially.

the sales associate attached the mobile hotspot to my tablet so the wifi was slow to begin with since the tablet only offers 3G speeds. then when i went to get it fixed i was duped into uping the Gigs to 6 from 2 because “it will help me work from home better” >surejan.gif< then when i saw how slow the connection still was, the associate over the phone convinced me that what i really needed to have more bandwidth is to get the 100Gig package because that “makes more sense”. well its been a couple days and i saw that the mobile hotspot connects to a city that isnt where i live. neither my account has been updated to show i have 100gb or has the speed improved. so after an hour on hold for a specialist technician, i get the most BS in 5 minutes i could have been told since the begining to avoid all this mess. i was told that because the “tower that my device was connecting too had so much traffic, that was slowing down my speeds and i should wait for a less trafficed time to use my mobile hotspot to see improvement”. so i asked then what was the point of being sold such a useless device. to which he said “well we are trying to improve our towers”. ive only had this device for one week and it is very much going back to the store!

All of corporate life is this way. They use the bare minimum. My download speed since December has been .6mbps-.8mbps and upload speed has been 5mbps-9mbps.  Why the higher upload speed than the download speed on a mobile hotspot & MY DATA???!!!??!!  Both get around the same speed at all times... Regardless of the time of day. It's all nonsense everyone. They specifically adjust the speeds. As if you were to simply turn the water faucet on full blast, but only get a drop. Why?  What's the problem corporate america?  You're not making enough  money you . I'll sell my soul for fantastic, full speed mobile hotspot.  Sounds pricy enough you pieces of.

It's simple. Put into the service what you claim to offer and we will all gladly pay the already inflated amount you are forcing us to pay anyways ... But at least then you won't be complete .

Im a little late to the party but I've just noticed my slow hotspot about 2 weeks ago. I never noticed any problems a couple months ago until I recently went on travel and had to use my hotspot again. Needless to say I was connecting between .2 - .6Mbps and could barely load a video or webpages. I've been with T-Mobile for 3-4 years now and been happy until this recent issue. I seriously thought they would be a lot different than other carriers but they're just the same. They all try to squeeze the most money out of you and it seems this is one of their tactics, slowing down your hotspot speed so you can pay for more data with higher speed rate. Pretty sad. It might be time to switch but the problem is trying to figure out which carrier is less evil than the other.

I feel totally duped by T-Mobile.

i have purchased a 15 GB high speed data pass plan for my vacation trip to another country. I took this because i knew i will have almost no internet and need fast wifi…..but surely not (only) on my phone but i need it though the horpsot on my mac and my tablet.

The good thing…the speed on my iphoe is raslly fast with 180 mbps.

The VERY bad thing, as i purchased the plan only to get my other devices to work….the tehtering with the hotspot only delives about 1.4 mbps !! Thats less than a hundredth !!
i cant work with this and the money for my plan is totally wasted.

last time i purchased a plan from t-mobile…

It depends on your specific plan. For example, our Magenta plans include 3 GB of 4G LTE mobile hotspot data that drops down to 3G once you've used it up. But our Essentials plan doesn't include any 4G LTE mobile hotspot data, only 3G speeds unless you add on a hotspot feature. You can use My T-Mobile or the T-Mobile app to see what plan you have and what's included.