In March 2016, Netflix admitted to throttling: Netflix throttles video on AT&T and Verizon to keep users under data caps. It turns out Netflix throttling on cellular data networks has been a thing for years. This just makes my earlier conclusion all the more valid: do not trust a single speed test. It is very likely that the cellphone company is limiting Netflix speeds and that is why never tests at faster than 1.5Mbps. And, Netflix, which runs the site, is the home office for streaming video. The cellphone company surely wants to limit streaming video to cut down on their bandwidth usage. What's different about 4G/LTE compared to a home Internet connection? Data usage to a cellphone provider is much more precious than it is to a company offering a wired coaxial cable or optical connection. The router is connected to a cellphone company. After a while, a perfect explanation occurred to me. ![]() Someone commented on this and it got me thinking again about why would report such different results. These drastically different results led me to try some other speed tests. The download speed this time was 1.4Mbps down and 11 Mbps up. Hoping that the result was a fluke, I ran it again, but from a different browser. Next, I tried the Speedtest app, which reported 16Mbps down and 4Mbps up. As you can see, it reported a miserable 1.5Mbps download speed and a perfectly acceptable 12Mpbs upload speed. I started with the simplest test, the website from Netflix. As is the norm, the 2.4GHz channel was 20MHz wide. The tests were done in a crowded Wi-Fi area, so they may have been subject to interference on either the used Wi-Fi channel or an adjacent one. I tested using an Android 10 phone with excellent (-50dBm) signal strength. Think of it as a spare tire in the trunk of a car. Its Wi-Fi only runs on the 2.4GHz band and its Ethernet ports are only 100Mbps. It is meant to work as a backup, for when a primary, wired Internet connection either fails or slows down. ![]() Today, I tested it again.īACKGROUND: The router is no speed demon. When I first tested the speed offered by the cellular company it was miserably slow. You connect to the router, just like any other, with Ethernet or Wi-Fi. You insert one or two SIM cards into the router and it uses 4G/LTE data for Internet access. ![]() One aspect of this is the Internet speed test. Those I have read so far has been miserably incomplete. Every publication has, or is, writing an article about improving your Wi-Fi speed.
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