In March of 2008 I got data tethering working on my Verizon cell phone. This means I could use it as an external modem for my laptop. At the time I ran a speed test, and blogged about it. It was 0.96 Mb/s down, and 0.12 Mb/s up.
Late last year I turned off the data plan altogether, and then recently turned it back on. It took a bunch of work to get tethering working again, eventually involving a hard rest of my phone (yuck). But now it works, and I did another speed test. Here are my first results:
That didn’t seem right at all, so I ran it several more times, from different remote locations. No real change at all. I decided to wait a day and see if it was sun spots or something. The next day wasn’t much different until I turned my phone over, making the antenna point up. Then I got this:
That’s much better, but less than half what I was getting last year. Any Verizon users out there have similar experiences? Any reasons?
I tether a Motorola phone using Alltel and I would guess the discrepancy maybe be accounted for by remembering that Alltel and Verizon merged. I have also noticed a steady decline in Alltel’s reliability as it relates to tethering.
What phone are you using, btw? I am up for a new one in a couple of months.
It’s an Samsung i760 for now. Switching to the Blackberry 8900 soon.