I have been traveling again and my phone reminded me of an important lesson. I carry a prepaid cell phone these days and rely on it (and a prepaid unlimited plan) to provide me with internet service while on the road. Motel wifi tends to be way too iffy at best and downright useless all too often, so my phone becomes a hotspot and usually provides good service.
Now, I am not going to say that 4G or LTE is fast enough to compete with the office internet and wired network connections tend to be much more trouble-free than wifi; but, when away from the office, my phone provides the next best thing. 5G service, when available, is darned close; but, I rarely find myself in 5G service areas. Just the same, I find I can stream movies, videos, tv shows and the like just fine with 4G or LTE (branding affects what it is called and I tend to get 4G LTE service in most areas while in some towns the carrier just has 4G or just has LTE, in all cases my phone works it out for me)
So, back to lessons learned or reminded of. In medium-sized metropolitan areas and larger towns, cities, any given location may be within range of towers owned by a variety of carriers; and not all carriers provide the same quality of service. My phone automatically selects which tower to use based on the phone carrier signal quality; generally, the one with the best signal quality is chosen to provide connectivity. The automatically chosen tower may not provide the best internet service for you. I was reminded this week (by my phone) that it helps to go in (into settings in your phone) and manually select your service provider when multiple providers are available.
In this lesson, the difference was remarkable with one carrier providing insufficient speed to get an address before it timed out and my “home” carrier providing 72m / 72m service that has been an absolute delight. My phone had auto chosen AT&T for service which for whatever reason (heavy loads by contracted users and I was a roaming user) provided almost no service; but, T-Mobile had a tower providing half the signal quality to my location but clearly had no load on it and provided a tested 72m up and down speed. A Verizon tower also provided decent service with 5m download speeds, but in this specific case T-Mobile was the best choice for me. Which carrier is best will be different in every location. The best choice for you may vary depending on your phone contract as well as location.
It can be helpful to talk with your cellular retailer or tech support to get their hints and recommendations for how to get the best service when you are away from home or the office. Oh, and don’t forget to set your phone back to automatic carrier detection once you are on the move again (assuming that is the default with your carrier and contract).