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Using my iPhone as a personal hotspot for "working from second home" for my laptop, in a house that doesn't have wired broadband, and not wanting to install wired broadband.
Signal seems good, but bandwidth occasionally in certain circumstances - usually group video calls - is sometimes really bad.
Wondering if anyone has experience with this - does a dedicated 4G router generally perform better, or is an iPhone in personal hotspot mode as good of a "4G router" as you can expect?
Just done this. Wish I'd done a little more research first.
I've just moved to an area where the broadband is circa 4-5mbs on a good day with a fair wind and with the huawei decision also effecting fibre rollout we are not going to see an improvement any time soon. EE 4g on my work iphone (an old SE) at the address was clocking 40+mbs.
Extra complication is I want the broadband to cover two houses and a workshop.
So I've bought an Outdoor Router (it's a brand but also a good description what it is - total overkill for your needs) which is providing a good strong wifi signal across the site and the main house has a mesh system connected to the LAN socket of the router.
It works - it's just not as fast as I'd hoped - 13mbs ave I'd say. A bit of research has shown that the gubbins on a lot of 4G routers (even the more conventional ones you'd likely get) is not very up to date. This one is Cat 4 - I think most phones are Cat 12 or better now. I'm not too techy but I think that means they use fewer channels and are capable of less impressive speeds.
That was a very long and complicated way of saying you are probably better off (or at least no worse off) using your phone from a performance perspective as long as your data allowance on your contract can handle it.
Thanks @convert - good input. I should have mentioned I have 100G on my contract, and as far as I know personal hotspot/tethering isn't being throttled. So sounds like stick with the phone.
If your speed is lacking I'd probably try and get some free payg sim cards from all the operators (or find people on those networks) and check what speed you can get, one provider might only be 10mbps where another could be 100mbps.
I was amazed to find my EE connection on the edge of the peak district was giving me over 100mbps, where at home in a major town in Kent I get 3-4mbps in my WFH office...
It's a few years ago (2016-17) but I had a MiFi box (TP-link M7350) in temp accomm. Both my phone SIM and the Mifi box SIM were on the same network EE, if memory serves me correctly the data speeds were pretty much the same.
NB This was from doing speed tests on my phone web browser and laptop (laptop connected to mifi box). I've never used my phone as a hotspot, so not sure if that would make any difference