Why is my mobile hotspot so much slower than my regular data connection?

Hey I switched from Verizon and they are just straight up thieves and proud of it. The Verizon reps told me to leave and go to t-mobile or AT&T if I wanted a lower bill.

Yeah this isn't 3G. I am getting speeds slower than 2G on my Hotspot. False advertisement all around. Also laughing at all these books people wrote complaining about this junk Hotspot speed haha.

I’ve had TM for several years. The first year or so, my hotspot worked great, very fast. For the last year or so, it’s useless. I don’t even try anymore. The speedtest I just ran today saw .43 down. My plan is the same, so I don’t know why it changed so drastically.

When I travel, I buy local sim cards in every country. I never have a problem with using my phone as a hotspot. Then I come back to America and find that you vampires try to charge extra for something I get for free everywhere else. It's insulting and I'm extremely unhappy about it.

Same problem here in Italy. LTE overall is not great but sufficient. Tethering by any method is garbage — I cannot work on my laptop. Different CS reps give a variety of answers but nothing fixes the issue. 

I always had fast tether speeds on a military plan, but this year it will to under 1mbps. Even the phone data would be about the same. every week id call and be told different excuses from different people. one guy said a previous guy removed my high speed tether and that he put it back. Then another said it had not been put back. I was paying $25 extra just for my line and for years it worked great in every state while travelling.  They say its tower upgrades, then the next person says its fiber optics, towers are down, towers are fine. they then convinced me to do magenta and it would only cost $30 more for the entire bill. i had them do that in hopes it would fix a problem that never happened before. i tried different phones and laptops so i know its not on my side. Anyhow, the bill jumped for each line. so we pulled the plug on Magenta due to lies and the fact the service did not improve. Im down to the 40gb that comes with the basic plan and in over a week i have not had to call and complain yet? we will see what happens when i hit the 40gb, but i decided instead of getting nowhere with tmobile ill just get cable internet. and, no i will not recommend tmobile 100%, because their reps lie and never fixed my problems. If your tech reps and such are so poorly trained thet you need to address this and your congested towers! I believe everything gets throttled no matter your plan when towers are congested! so there is no fix for your data problems...so dont keep paying them for add ones for bad service. i can get cable internet for $30/month...i don’t need t mobiles lies! 

I have this issue as well.  

Hotspot on your phone device is limited by plan eg.  I get 3g speeds on my One plan.  Magenta gives 5GB, , Magenta Max gives 40GB.

TMobile has Hotspot plans for for mifi which are 50GB.  only the home internet service will give unlimited on Hotspot style connections

I finally found a T-Mobile tower near me that is already 5G Ultra capacity (and 100MHz). My MiFi 2000 zoomed up to 313 Mbps download speed at 7 pm (likely the busy hour) and the ping was at an astounding 16ms. So, it is safe to say the MiFi 2000 works as advertised and is not being throttled. Next, when I receive my 5G iPhone 13, I’ll run the same test at the same location along with my MiFi 2000 to see if there is any difference. I doubt I’ll see any difference.

The way I tested the MiFi 2000 is I connect my smartphone to the MiFi 2000’s WiFi (turn on airplane mode to turn off cellular) and run the Speedtest.net application on the smartphone (download and use the app -  this way you can click on results and you get a wealth of information (lat and Longitude coordinates, map, etc.).

How is the moderator concluding that this huge issue is SOLVED?????

The ONLY solution is to REMOVE THROTTLING from non-phone devices. Until that is done this huge issue remains UNSOLVED and needs to be resolved immediately. Why would anyone buy a useless piece of equipment that doesn’t work as advertised unless we were duped and not told that it would secretly be throttled after we bought it??

I am beyond frustrated with this issue. I’ve been a TMO customer for 20 years. This issue is unfixable at the client side and hours of calls with support does nothing. There is clearly some network management rule in effect that throttles speeds for users accessing the hotspot feature regardless of what plan you have. It doesn’t matter what phone you have, what city you are in, what time of the day it is, what is included in your plan, or how much data you used up to that point. It NEVER delivers 5g speeds or even 4G speeds most of the time. It’s significantly slower. Often it’s completely unusable (dropping to less than 1Mbps) despite not being close to being over the 40GB cap. In addition, they consistently overstate the hotspot usage in order for you to hit whatever cap you have. 

This issue really sucks and it’s affecting my remote work which requires a reliable internet connection and the ability to not have a zoom call that is a choppy, distorted mess. I’m at the point where I really have no choice but to cancel after 20 years and switch to a different service provider. This is my first and potentially last post. I never complained about anything that entire time until now. But I’m tired of paying for a service that doesn’t deliver what was advertised and wasting countless hours trying to resolve it. The only fix is for TMO to stop throttling users on the network side whenever hotspot is used. 

I was a huge fan of TMobile up untill 4 months ago. I would tell everyone " I'm never going to cheat on them"I really loved the customer support. As of recently I want nothing to do with these people they are scamming us. I have been through so much with not getting sufficient speeds to be able to work. I upgraded my plan, I bought a new devise, the new devise didn't work, I had to be at the store 4 hours when I was supposed to be working. They lost my sim card to my phone and the connector. When I tried to tell them the new phone won't even connect they tried to tell me it's promotional I can't return it. I said but it doesn't connect. Wtf do you mean they told me well does it make calls? SMH really TMobile. Finely I told them I'm not leaving untill they return it,I sat there plugged in my work computer. They finally said they will return it. After that They upgraded my plan so I could get "better signal" knowing the towers are down. They then said oh we can rest your Internet it should work better. And that didn't work .. meanwhile I'm spending hours in between on the phone with reps and in store. Finally I get my people at work to test my speeds, or lack thereof. I let them know I'm about to loose my job due to this it's making me look like I'm playing around at home and not working. I let them know the speeds and that was when I found out about the "towers are down in my zip code" these people then apologize and offer a $30 credit. I say thank you but what I really want is a working connection. They then offer to reset phone again. The service was worse. Now I need to pay for childcare go into the office and work. Now we are on month 2 of issues I attempt to work from home.. same thing but I can't even connect at all. I call them they say wouldn't tell me about the outage in my area so I let them know, they. To my surprise yes man it's been out for several months but they are working on it. The last guy did not not give me my credit I told the lady that I was promised a credit and was not honored and she said my personal guarantee. He will credit the 39 and what I'm going to do for you is give you another credit of .....I  said I just want working internet.  Well I ended up getting a $25 credit and that was all. I called them I said you guys promised 2 credits and all that's there is 1 for $25 and that's after I complained about it not being there. They said well we can't refund you any money that was a promotion. Now my blood pressure is through the roof I have my boss texting me wondering what's going on, ... The stress these people cause by trying to give you the run around is BS. They just care about the next $1. Well I let them know they are crooked taking people money for upgrades and selling new devised and mo to