I’m not really sure how to read all of this info ha.
And by “not really sure” I mean not at all
I did just now notice on my screenshots that with my main sim, the other app I have showed
Frequency 2650mhz
Bandwidth 20,000 khz
But with the new sim, same phone
Frequency 955mhz
Bandwidth 10,000 khz
Just being a point in time tho I’m not sure. Would need to swap again and see if this is consistent.
With the router tho, I get the same crap speed regardless of SIM. The actual browsing speed is way slower than the test would indicate too. I looked up reviews just now and it’s rated well on Amazon
That’d be strange. I was in an AirBNB once and they had some old-looking egg-sized thing with no external antenna that had decent speed. The router I bought seems to be TP-Link’s best one.
Dunno how returns on Shopee are but I might have to try that.
You can turn off and on airplane mode repeatedly. It should re-connect and show you whether it is consistently connecting to certain bands (Mhz) and bandwidth. If both phones support the same bands they should settle on the same band most of the time.
You can check whether the band your (newer) phone settles on most of the time is supported by your modem. Your modem may also have the option to show what band it settled on. Maybe move the router closer to the window.
I have a 4G router with an external antenna that I bought separately. The antenna is hanging high on up near a window.
If you are using the computer for extended period of time, then I would recommend connecting the phone using a USB cable to the computer and share the Internet over USB (USB tethering). Wired connection is more stable, has higher throughput and the phone won’t get as hot when the wifi hotspot is off.
Finally did some more tests today. Both SIMs produce about the same results afterall. Both will variably use different bands and frequencies and such. Strangely it never sticks with one. And often the app will show that other neighboring towers have stronger signal and such than the one it’s connected to.
But in any case, the problem seems to be with the router. I get dogshit speed. And I tested the signal strength and noise around it and it’s no worse there than where I use my phone on my couch. It also reports the signal info on its config page and it’s in line with what my phone gets.
So, same bands, same strength and noise ratio, and my phone reports a strong signal from the router itself, so I dunno…
The router won’t show detailed info on its connection, just this:
What kind of router do you have? Try playing a few Youtube videos at 1080p in parallel and report back how many you can start and run simultaneously before they stutter. Also, put your router near the window maybe.
When it’s feeling generous I can get 15-20 but usually not. Sometimes 5.
It’s already at window-height on a table maybe 5 ft from a very wide window. I’ll try closer just to see but with its two big antenna it shouldn’t make much difference. Hard to believe it’d pick up signal worse than my phone.
I dunno what else to check tho. There aren’t any firmware upgrades available.
Maybe you have tested this already, but if you share a hotspot from your phone to your PC, you probably cannot get more than 2-3 Youtube videos running without stalling either. Try it? My suggestion is that probably the performance is about the same as on your phones and limited by the SIM. I say this because I have unlimited 4G through a modem (MR6400) and my internet also stalls out at about 2-4 Youtube videos. I suspect that is pretty much the best you can expect from 4G in Taiwan. And why do Speedtests on your phone perform better for very short durations? 4G Providers may tweak for that.
Not sure about YT videos but just browsing simple websites I notice a huge difference in the speed of everything loading on the wifi router vs hotspot. Like I see images progressively loading when on hotspot they just load. So definitely not just the speed testing but real-world.
I just upgraded my phone first time after 3 years - and noticed that I get way faster speeds on Circles.Life - the bands are the same - BUT - my new Vivo x90 Pro+ supports MIMO - and that like tripples the speeds I get.
Yesterday at night I even got 120Mbit - that’s 5G like speed and rarely ever seen on speedtest app on a 4G phone… My old P30 Pro supposedly also supported MIMO - but maybe not the right combination of bands?
Yesterday I suddenly noticed I’m logged into 5G. Maybe changes coming up ahead? Sadly it was only 30 minutes or so. Got 90Mbit on Speedtest download with a measly 0.7mbit on upload when I tested while being connected 5G.
My girlfriend switched to Circles Life and complained about speed. She got 1/10 of my speeds. We echanged simcards and mine was much faster in her phone, hers in my phone much slower.
Checked the network cells - connecting to the same. Really not sure what’s going on there.
Asking for another sim at Circles Life. With slow I mean ridiculously slow. E.g. I get 50/2MB - here sim card gives me 5/0.5. In her Iphone 13 Pro which clearly has worse reception than mine this went down to 2.5/0.05 with ping of 3-4 seconds for upload, and 2 seconds on download on speedtest app. So clearly here Iphone connects to less bands simultaniously vs my phone - but the main difference is the sim card itself.
Don’t get what’s going on for her. But it’s unusable speed. Not sure if they have some preferential tiers and if the cell gets crowded here SIM is slowed to oblivion while mine works okay (which is even crazier as I use about 400GB of data a month, while she uses very little).
In general in Taichung on my simcard I get 15-60Mbit down, but only 2-3Mbit upload. Clearly was better last year. I feel Chughwa is shutting down 4G antennas and replacing their software with 5G so speeds degrade as circles.life doesn’t support 5G (can sometimes log in shortly - but get kicked out quickly again).
