When I was recently in a Starbucks and wanted to get some work done over a coffee I was quite surprised that despite good cellular network coverage, the Internet connection from my smartphone to the PC via Wi-Fi tethering was behaving very strangely. Needless to say that I started to investigate...
As I wanted to download a firmware image of a couple of hundred megabits I counted on the LTE network to give me adequate speed. But all I got was half a megabit per second and very erratic round trip delay times. Moving the smartphone sometimes helped for a second or two but then data rates were done and delay was up once again. O.K. so perhaps an LTE problem I thought, let's switch to UMTS. Strangely enough I encountered exactly the same problem there!? O.k. so perhaps the phone has a problem, lets restart it. But no, again the same problem afterward!?
Now I was a bit at a loss for a moment, what else could it be? Then I realized that there is one more wireless link, i.e. the Wi-Fi connection between the smartphone and the PC. Perhaps something strange is going on there!? So I disabled auto-channel selection in the tethering configuration and manually set a channel. And voila, LTE became lightning fast, the download of the firmware image I needed started to run at 20 Mbit/s and everything was o.k. Interesting, something must have interfered on the 2.4 GHz channel the smartphone started the tethering hotspot on. Something to remember.
How did you set up the channel number of WiFi in Tetgering?
I cannot find such an option in Android 4.2.2
Posted by: Simon | March 07, 2013 at 10:39 PM
Hi,
it seems to be Android version and manufacturer dependent. I could find the setting on the HTC phone I was using for Wi-Fi tethering but not on a Samsung smartphone and also not on a Samsung tablet.
-Martin
Posted by: mobilesociety | March 08, 2013 at 07:12 AM