Ok, so I'm in the process of moving between homes and with most of the stuff in my new home and over 2 weeks until the cable can be hooked up I went ahead and installed the modified At&t profile to unlock the tethering on my iPhone (3g on At&t in philadelphia) so that I can get online with my computer until the cable is here.
I use it via bluetooth with my imac and the first thing I was impressed with was just how fast the computer went around loading web pages and whatnot, even youtube runs movies almost as soon as it would have with my regular cable connection. I saw one movie that was particularly funny and I sent an sms to my phone with the link, which I checked out real quick. When I did this on the phone I noticed that not only did the youtube app load and play the movie faster than usual, it did it in the high quality mode that's usually only active when I'm on wifi. I found this very odd since the iPhone is now the source of the connection. I then decided to check my mail, do some surfing etc and to my suprise all were notably faster. I then go to my mac turn off the bluetooth connection so that the blue tethering bar goes away on my phone and bam everything slows down and youtube goes back to the low quality version.
So it would seem, at least in my case, that the iPhone has the potential to be much faster than it currently is, but that At&t throttles the connection while the phone only is using it, and then opens the connection up when the phone is in tethering mode. I wonder if there's any way to make the phone think it's in a tethered mode all the time even when it's not, so that I could get the faster connection always. If so that would be great!
(fyi, when testing this make sure the computer isn't loading anything while tethered or else the phone will seem slower since the connection will be going to the computer too)
I use it via bluetooth with my imac and the first thing I was impressed with was just how fast the computer went around loading web pages and whatnot, even youtube runs movies almost as soon as it would have with my regular cable connection. I saw one movie that was particularly funny and I sent an sms to my phone with the link, which I checked out real quick. When I did this on the phone I noticed that not only did the youtube app load and play the movie faster than usual, it did it in the high quality mode that's usually only active when I'm on wifi. I found this very odd since the iPhone is now the source of the connection. I then decided to check my mail, do some surfing etc and to my suprise all were notably faster. I then go to my mac turn off the bluetooth connection so that the blue tethering bar goes away on my phone and bam everything slows down and youtube goes back to the low quality version.
So it would seem, at least in my case, that the iPhone has the potential to be much faster than it currently is, but that At&t throttles the connection while the phone only is using it, and then opens the connection up when the phone is in tethering mode. I wonder if there's any way to make the phone think it's in a tethered mode all the time even when it's not, so that I could get the faster connection always. If so that would be great!
(fyi, when testing this make sure the computer isn't loading anything while tethered or else the phone will seem slower since the connection will be going to the computer too)
