I’ve been dealing with a really strange AT&T Personal Hotspot issue for over a week and I’m wondering if anyone else is seeing the same thing.
Cellular data directly on my iPhone is completely normal and fast. The problem only starts when another device uses my Personal Hotspot. About 90% of the time websites either time out/error out or never finish loading. Occasionally something will load after several minutes, but it’s basically unusable.
I’ve done quite a bit of troubleshooting at this point:
– Tested my Windows laptop over Wi-Fi hotspot — unusably slow.
– Tested the same laptop over USB tethering — same problem.
– Connected a different iPhone to my hotspot — same extremely slow connection, so it isn’t just my laptop.
– My laptop works normally on other Wi-Fi networks.
– Tested my mom’s iPhone hotspot, which is on the same AT&T plan, and it worked perfectly with good speeds.
– Reset Network Settings on my iPhone — no change.
– Restarted everything, forgot/rejoined the hotspot, tested different browsers, etc.
– Basic ping/DNS tests from the laptop worked and showed no obvious packet loss.
– My hotspot allowance recently reset for the new billing cycle and I am now at 0 GB used out of 15 GB, and the problem is still happening.
So this definitely isn’t because I hit my hotspot limit.
AT&T support eventually told me their backend team is aware of a hotspot issue affecting multiple customers and is supposedly working on it, but they couldn’t give me an incident page, ticket, ETA, or anything else I could track.
Is anyone else experiencing this specifically where the iPhone’s own cellular connection is fast, but all tethered/hotspot traffic is practically unusable? If so, has AT&T actually fixed it for anyone or reprovisioned something on your line?
Source: r/ATT · by /u/SoYouAreTheYeti