How do I speed up my phone internet connection

[Badger]

My phone internet speed is about 10 times slower today. Not sure whAt is happening 

 

 

[Grailknight]

Probably a tower outage, or you could have gone over your limit for the month and be getting slowed down by your carrier. Unlimited data does not usually mean unlimited at the top speed.

 

[Old Man]

Sometimes you can force your phone to renew its connection by temporarily putting it in airplane mode, or by turning it off and in again.

 

Or, it might be that the 5G cell phone tower is busy infecting you with the coronavirus. That must take a lot of bandwidth. 

[Ternaugh]

Cellular modems can be slowed by congestion on the tower segment, the backhaul, or by environmental effects. 

 

A cell phone tower uses tower segments, basically wedges where the antennas are aimed. Each segment has one or more base stations, and it's possible that some systems don't handle load-balancing properly, which results in most connections to one base station, while the others are underutilized. Some carriers will also resort to throttling those who are using more resources in these cases, so it's possible to be network-managed on only certain tower segments.

 

Older cell phone towers often had slower backhaul connections, which limited the total throughput from the entire tower. When they were upgraded to 4G (or now 5G), the backhaul also needed to be updated to allow for faster throughput, but this was sometimes skipped to save money.

 

Environmental effects, like weather, distance to the tower, physical obstructions like buildings or trees can all attenuate the signal. Building materials will also attenuate signals, especially in the higher frequency bands. Clearwire/Sprint's old WiMAX network used to operate at 2.5 GHz, and the signal had difficulty penetrating brick or energy-efficient (argon-filled) windows. Verizon's new 5G is having similar issues now in its upper bands.

 

It's possible that a local tower was turned off, which would cause the cellular modem to skip to a more distant tower, which will lower speeds. It's also possible to be too close to a tower, as the way the base station antennas are aimed, it creates an "umbrella effect" underneath the tower where the signal is very weak. People in skyscrapers are sometimes above the signal pattern, and may also have trouble  connecting.  

 

My current cellular devices have trouble penetrating a couple of concrete walls at work, and I find that I need to reorient the devices if I'm trying to connect to the LTE. It also doesn't help that the nearest cellular tower is actually in the other direction, and I'm actually using a reflected signal. At my home, it's generally ok, but it really rocks at my friend's house, where there's a close tower that lines up very well with his sliding glass door to his patio.

[Badger]

Working fine today. I did do my monthly renewal yesterday, so I wonder if that had something to do with it. Thanks, I will keep all this in mind just in case.

 

For what it is worth, I have generally only used it for phone and internet. Nothing else as yet.

[unclevlad]

5 hours ago, Badger said:

Working fine today. I did do my monthly renewal yesterday, so I wonder if that had something to do with it. Thanks, I will keep all this in mind just in case.

 

For what it is worth, I have generally only used it for phone and internet. Nothing else as yet.

 

THAT sounds like throttling.  Web pages aren't usually that big, but...these days, some are, with all the freakin' ads.  Next time this happens, you might want to check in your Settings, there should be a spot showing your data usage.

And if you have wifi at home?  Wifi is likely much faster, especially if you have 5 GHz and not just 2.4.  It'll likely to be limited to your internet connection's speed, unless you've got pretty old gear.  Even then, cell throughput is pretty poor if you aren't running 5G.