area dependent 4G tethering bandwidth

[rev_dave]

I have a 4G monthly 500MB data contract, a Nokia Lumia 635 and a MS Surface 2 tablet. at home in Haslemere I was able to tether 2 PCs and the tablet to my phone for several hours recently when the home broadband failed. Brilliant!

When on holiday last week around the river Wey in Guildford and Godalming I bought an extra 1GB bolt on for the trip some time into the holiday. all fine until I reached Guildford. Suddenly the tablet said 'limited connectivity' on the wifi Nokia tether connection. I could just squeeze an email in or out but MSN news, weather app and browser all said I was offline. rebooted phone. rebooted tablet. no joy. the phone connected fine and would browse but still little or no connectivity on the tethered connection.

back home in Haslemere again, no change to any settings, and we were at full speed again.

any bright ideas? at home:

4G, 3-4 pips of 5 signal strength, clean reboots, full bandwidth on phone, full bandwidth on tablet tethering

in Guildford/Godalming:

4G, 3-4 pips of 5 signal strength, clean reboots, full bandwidth on phone, hopeless bandwidth on tablet tehtering

the difference? some weird limitation to boaters? dislike to places beginning with the letter G? I can only think that some 4G signals are deliberately programmed to prevent tethering, if that's technically possible.

Advice or explanation to this throttling experience welcome!

[MI5]

Data compression.

[rev_dave]

sorry, you're going to have to have to unpack that a bit! what exactly is data compression in this context and why might it be a problem in Godalming and not Haslemere?

[MI5]

Sorry, probably should have ended with a ?
My thoughts were that if the network compression settings were higher in some areas (due to network load) there may not be enough bandwidth for tethering to work properly?
It was all I could think of tbh.....

[perksie]

O2 Status doesn't show a good 4G signal in Godalming: http://status.o2.co.uk/