iPhone 5 - Bluetooth LTE Tethering Slow..

I just recently got the iPad mini and I have been coming to very similar conclusions. I have an iPhone 5 on AT&T and my data speeds while tethered via Bluetooth are around 2-3 Mbps at best, while I'm getting 25-30 Mbps via wifi. From what I can tell, the Bluetooth transfer speeds are just slower. Not much we can do about it, it seems.

For handling most tasks it's fine and since its connected via Bluetooth, the connection persists, even when your iPhone is on standby. When tethering via wifi I've found that if the device I'm tethering with goes into standby mode, when I wake it, I've got to re-establish the connection which can get annoying. It seems like we have to choose between the slower, yet persistent Bluetooth connection or the faster, battery draining and inconsistent wifi connection.

Hope this info helps.

I am also finding that the iPhone 5 and my laptop Bluetooth 4.0 card are not running High Speed mode together to get the faster throughput. My iPhone5 will speedtest.net on LTE to around 98mbps down and 65mbps up, but my laptop that is tethered will only net about 1.7mbps each way. The WiFi on both laptop and iphone are not connected to any wifi networks at the time but it seems as though bluetooth will not negotiate a high speed link and use the 802.11 radio to transfer data around the 20mbps speed. Very dissapointing

Same here. Our experience as well as from others just confirms that maybe Apple is putting a cap on the Bluetooth 4.0 speed on this because otherwise it just doesn't make sense.

There is no other explanation that I tether from my iPhone 5 to iPad 2 (Bluetooth 2.1) and iPad 3 (Bluetooth 4.0) and get the same speed of around 1.70 mbps.