Me and my computer are in a place today where there is no WIFI. In those times I use the personal hotspot on my phone to connect to the Internet. This generally works well. But today there was a problem. The connection speed all of the sudden went down to 80's dial-up Matthew Broderick in War Games speed.
Obviously that's unacceptable.
So I did all the usual things. Unplugged the phone and plugged it back in. Turned off the hotspot and turned it back on. Even powered OFF the phone (now that's desperate.) None of these actions improved the speed. At the top it said "LTE" with 3 bars which is not ideal, I'd like at LEAST 4 bars but 3 was working fine before.
So then I went into settings and saw one for "Enable LTE". It says if you enable this it makes your data faster, but obviously this was not what I was experiencing. So I did the opposite. I disabled LTE.
At that point the phone automatically switched to 4G and I got FOUR bars and the speed instantly improved. I was back online! PHEW! (I'm not a person that can tolerate being offline. Until I get reconnected life stops as I know it.)
When I got back online I did a little research and from what I can gather LTE and 4G are the same thing. NOW I was really confused. So I thought maybe it was just a glitch in timing so I switched back to LTE to see. Again with the 96-baud modem. So back to 4G.
So the lesson is that if AT&T is your carrier and depending upon where you are in the world, LTE and 4G might be different.
We both learned something new today. Fun!