Hotspot ping issues to any iOS device
I discovered this when trying to run my 4G thunderbolt hotspot to an ipod touch 4th gen. Ping was poor, nearly unusable. On the 4g hotspot, pings in the 350s-450s (ms) caused speeds averaging 500-600 kilobits per second. The bandwidth expectation on this hotspot is 7-15 Megabits per second.
So I got curious about iOS use of hotspots, figuring I just had a very specific incompatibility between the ipod hardware and the wifi on the HTC unit. So I tested the iPad and our verizon iphone... same results. Bad ping, bad speed.
So I took it a step further and ran the iPhone's hotspot to another iphone, the ipod, and the ipad.. Still terrible ping, even worse speeds since that's only putting out 3g which maxes out at 1.4 Megabits per sec or so. Couldn't top 300 kilobits from the iPhone personal hotspot.
The only device that doesn't have these issues is the macbook. It pings just fine, 100ms, to the iPhone or the thunderbolt, in the same locations.
All tests were conducted with the speedtest.net native app. For extra certainty I ran tracert.org bandwidth meter as well to see if it was by chance a bad reading. I also did some facetime calls under each test environment to check for signs of the struggling bandwidth. I definitely experienced audio catchup and occasional picture stop, the telltale signs of poor ping (latency) during facetime use. It didn't occur for the macbook over the 4g, given the good ping and bandwidth of 19 Megabits per sec.
Today I reported the problem to apple and explained how I expected the bad ping issue not to duplicate between iPhone 4 personal hotspot tethering the iPad. figuring apple to apple would be ok if my issue was hardware compatibility. Because it did not clear up, I explained that the issue seems like an iOS flaw. The iOS devices all run fast without ping issues over a regular router, but they choke over iPhone personal hotspot or other ad hoc internet connections. I was able to duplicate it in every test scenario but the macbook, showing it was not the hotspot itself creating the issue.
Has anyone else run into this or had a good performance over ad hoc connection types? I'm looking for more examples to provide to my level 2 apple senior tech I'm working with at this point
So I got curious about iOS use of hotspots, figuring I just had a very specific incompatibility between the ipod hardware and the wifi on the HTC unit. So I tested the iPad and our verizon iphone... same results. Bad ping, bad speed.
So I took it a step further and ran the iPhone's hotspot to another iphone, the ipod, and the ipad.. Still terrible ping, even worse speeds since that's only putting out 3g which maxes out at 1.4 Megabits per sec or so. Couldn't top 300 kilobits from the iPhone personal hotspot.
The only device that doesn't have these issues is the macbook. It pings just fine, 100ms, to the iPhone or the thunderbolt, in the same locations.
All tests were conducted with the speedtest.net native app. For extra certainty I ran tracert.org bandwidth meter as well to see if it was by chance a bad reading. I also did some facetime calls under each test environment to check for signs of the struggling bandwidth. I definitely experienced audio catchup and occasional picture stop, the telltale signs of poor ping (latency) during facetime use. It didn't occur for the macbook over the 4g, given the good ping and bandwidth of 19 Megabits per sec.
Today I reported the problem to apple and explained how I expected the bad ping issue not to duplicate between iPhone 4 personal hotspot tethering the iPad. figuring apple to apple would be ok if my issue was hardware compatibility. Because it did not clear up, I explained that the issue seems like an iOS flaw. The iOS devices all run fast without ping issues over a regular router, but they choke over iPhone personal hotspot or other ad hoc internet connections. I was able to duplicate it in every test scenario but the macbook, showing it was not the hotspot itself creating the issue.
Has anyone else run into this or had a good performance over ad hoc connection types? I'm looking for more examples to provide to my level 2 apple senior tech I'm working with at this point
macbook air, Mac OS X (10.6.6)
