Your neighbour's cheap phone gets faster tethering than your flagship. Before blaming the phone or the router, read this: on a mobile feed, position and timing rule everything, and the honest speed ranges are wider than any advertisement suggests.
A phone's internet speed is not a property of the phone — it is a property of where the phone is standing, which tower it can see, and how busy that tower is right now. The same handset can deliver a trickle on a desk inside a concrete room and a genuinely fast connection two metres away at a window. When the phone feeds a whole router, this effect is amplified: every device shares whatever the phone's position allows. Set expectations by measurement, not by the 4G or 5G logo.
Illustrative pattern from typical indoor placements — measure your own spots; the ranking surprises most people.
A newer phone may support more frequency bands and better aggregation, which helps at the margins. But moving the phone from a desk drawer area to a raised window position routinely changes the signal by an order of magnitude — walls, metal shutters and reinforced concrete eat mobile signal, and no handset specification compensates for a bad spot. The method: put the phone in each candidate position, tether it, and run the same speed test three times. Keep the position with the best worst result, not the best single spike. Then fix the phone there permanently — on the router setup, the phone is infrastructure with an address, not a handset that wanders.
Mobile towers are shared. In the evening, when the whole neighbourhood streams, per-user speeds on the same cell drop — sometimes to a fraction of the morning's. If your phone-fed network is fast at 10 a.m. and slow at 8 p.m. with identical equipment and signal bars, that is congestion, and no router setting fixes it. Plan heavy work (updates, big uploads) outside peak hours, and judge the setup by its peak-hour performance when deciding whether it can carry the office.
The wiring, the router settings and the live speed check — the complete process is shown in the video.
▶ Watch Full VideoBecause tethering speed is decided by signal position, tower load and band conditions at that moment — not by the phone's price. A cheap phone standing at a window with a clear tower view will beat a flagship buried inside a concrete room. Measure positions before judging hardware.
For billing, email, cloud documents and a few video calls, a steady 10–20 Mbps down with a few Mbps up is workable; more is comfort, not necessity. Steadiness matters more than peak numbers — a stable 15 Mbps beats a connection that swings between 60 and 2.
A properly installed external antenna on a dedicated 4G/5G router can genuinely help in weak-signal locations. Clip-on 'signal stickers' and cheap boosters of doubtful origin cannot. For a phone, repositioning is the free first step; persistent weak signal is an argument for a dedicated router with antenna ports, covered in this series.