I’m guessing a phone wifi hotspot does not provide router security features but a mobile router does?
What’s the top bandwidths you get with a phone that’s receiving LTE and broadcasting wifi at the same time?
If I use a phone as a 24/7 wifi hotspot, will the chip fry or something?
Does your average mobile wifi dongle have better LTE signal strength than your average smartphone?
I use the personal hotspot on my phone for years (iPhone 5S - 7) when on the road and downloading large files at home as my broadband (ADSL) is about 4-5Mb compared to around 17Mb on LTE.
Speed on LTE varies on how much traffic is running through the cell tower, generally they are microwave or fibre fed with about 50Mb/s at the main transmission rack in the cabin(et), more users on it, you can be down to 2Mb/s or less in cities etc.
At home I used to get 45Mb/s when it first went live, now it can be as little as 9Mb/s.
You won't fry the phone using it plugged into the wall 24/7. If you watch Hak5 on YouTube, they show a way you can tether your phone to a WiFi Pineappe TETRA and make it seem the traffic is coming through your phone for unlimited data.
Apple iPhone has MP-TCP enabled as first device ever, and it works with apps that are written to use MP-TCP. Tethering in iPhone is such an app, even though it's a built-in system app. That means that if you tether on a modern iPhone, the bandwidth of the WiFi connection to your phone and the bandwidth of the LTE connection on your phone, will be added, so can can achieve greater bandwidth than on either internet connections alone. No other consumer devices that I know of have MP-TCP implemented though.
Bandwidth will most likely be limited by the WiFi connection. The cell service (if you have excellent signal) is typically faster unless you've standardized on AC wifi.
For a permanent solution a phone is a poor choice. Power consumption will require your phone to be plugged in all the time, and some networks don't allow voice and data at the same time. For instance if you get a phone call in the middle of a download... (Sprint)
If on mobile hotspot you need to rely on the computer firewall. Also specify your own DNS.
And a VPN is a great idea on any cellular choice as all carriers run you through a proxy that sniffs http headers.
I have Verizon 4GLTE, use my Galaxy S5 as a tethering device for about 10GB a month. It is about 30MB/s down here and surrounding areas. No the phone wont fry...
Wow so an LTE tower has a total of 50Mb/s bandwidth that's shared with all phones that use it? I wonder if you can use 2 towers at the same time, or if the load balancing just means they instruct your phone to use a different cell tower. (wendell talked about this stuff at one point)
And I guess if you fall back to 3G it's even less.
Oh so you're saying you'll have a shared connection between data and wifi, and would get internet from both at the same time to your phone. That's cool.
So if you can get up to 50Mb/s from LTE, what is the max wifi tether speed that a phone outputs? I'm guessing it can't push out A/C or N router speeds since it has only one wifi antenna.
I guess it'll either be a Wireless-G (54 Mbps) or even Wireless-B (11 Mbps), I'll have to check.
Didn't think of that, will have to research.
So you get 30Mb download from your galaxy's wifi hotspot? That means the wifi chip isn't bottlenecking the LTE bandwidth. Cool.
Wasn't thinking of a permanent at-home solution, just for on-the-go or for finding a use for an old phone.
Really depends on the location of the tower and what transmission kit they are using. Some can be 200Mb/s, others around the 50Mb/s, in my home town its a 50Mb/s connection.
Even in city centres, with 200Mb/s (or even faster) connections they get bogged down due to the traffic running through them.
LTE is very hit or miss in terms of speed, depends on the equipment on the site too. E.g. I was at a service station off a motorway, 4G on O2 full signal. Trying to upload a file 3Mb took about 8 minutes, it was like going to dial-up. Tower was overloaded with transmission kit on-site was struggling to cope with demand.
P.S. I'm in the UK, so milage may vary in other countries.
