Related
I have my Tilt set up to charge when on USB. However, when I tether and download a lot of data, the phone seems to be using its battery rather than the power provided through the cable. I am connecting through a powered USB hub so there should be enough current.
When the phone is fully charged the green led remains lit but when I disconnect the phone the battery level drops 20-60% within 20 minutes or so. Also, when I leave the computer tethering through a phone for about 12 hours, it will eventually reset because the battery reaches a critical level.
I tried using a Y-USB cable (with 2 USB plugs for extra power) but there was no difference. So, I hooked up the phone through AC adapter and tethered through bluetooth. Again, the problem remains.
This seem to appear when downloading or uploading data over longer periods of time on 3G. When using HSPA it's even worse and often the green led starts blinking (as if there was no power from USB even for a standby mode).
The effect is not as noticeable when doing light browsing, especially on Edge.
Has anyone else experienced a similar problem?
Well, you basically answered the question. It should charge, while connected, but HSDPA burns battery at a rate faster than it can charge.
BUT, something doesn't sound right with your set up. It shouldn't drain THAT fast, even on HSDPA, esp if it's idle. While idle on 3G, it'll still use some battery, but it shouldn't be enough to burn your battery out.
I can think one of 2 things is happening. Either:
(1) yours isn't really charging while connected and tethering. I use Internet Sharing to tether. I assume you are also. Ther is a way to tether not using Internet Connection Sharing where it does NOT charge. Maybe that's how yours is set up? Or
(2) your "idle" connection isn't really idle. Some process is still actively querying and using the net connection.
Bottomline: on Edge, mine will net charge, not net lose. On 3G, mine will net charge, but very slowly. On HSDPA, mine will consume battery, but at a rate much slower than if I was just browsing on my Kaiser directly.
jomo25 said:
something doesn't sound right with your set up. It shouldn't drain THAT fast, even on HSDPA, esp if it's idle. While idle on 3G, it'll still use some battery, but it shouldn't be enough to burn your battery out.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your comments. I am using "Internet Sharing" and you are right - my connection is not idle. I do FTP download or upload at the rate of 20kb/s over a few hours.
While I thought the battery drain is understandable with the USB setup (not enough power) I am surprised to see the same problem when using an AC adapter (tethering via bluetooth). The output in my AC charger gives 5V / 1 A.
Is there a way to provide more power to the phone so I don't end up with drained battery after a longer tethering session?
Well, the only thing I can think of is to throttle your connection to no more than UMTS speed. I.e. disable HSDPA, but not all 3G. Or of course throttle all the way back to Edge. But of course, this sacrifices your connection speed. Using only UMTS (normal 3G) is sufficient for most of my purposes.
You can diable HSDPA by "Settings | Connections | HSDPA" ANd uncheck it.
You can disable 3G altogether by switching your band to Edge only or using one of the modified Comm Mgr apps that have a 3G toggle.
I don't know of any way to "up the power" to the phone.
If you require such an intensive data connection wouldn't it be better to invest in a PCMCIA HSDPA card?
You are pushing the phone way beyond recommended limits and the heat alone will probably fry the Tx or battery or some other circuit.
Just a thought.
Have you thought about reducing the power consumption of the other elements of your phone?
Do you for example turn down the screen brightness to minimum, and turn of bluetooth? Those two alone (especially if bluetooth is discoverable) are massive power drains all by themselves.
Surur
So far, throttling the speed seems to be the only working solution. I suspect that a PCMCIA HSPA card would require a different data plan with AT&T.
As for turning off features - yes, I use an app that turns off the screen and recently I started turning off bluetooth as well (although it has never been set to be discoverable).
all I can say is wow that's some hardcore usage! though I am a bit surprised that it drains battery so fast, I guess its cause of the power technology used, the phone can't use the mains directly as it can only pull power from the battery which can only be charged so fast due yo its nature, but weird !
It might be that transferring data at the same time as charging prevents it from charging as efficiently since it's using the same port.
Greg220 said:
So far, throttling the speed seems to be the only working solution. I suspect that a PCMCIA HSPA card would require a different data plan with AT&T.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just an FYI - if you use that much data xfer, dont be surprised if AT&T force-switches you to a more "appropriate" plan. There have been documented cases where AT&T will audit data usage and if you are on a plan that is "unlimited" but only for data usage from the phone, they will change you over to the data plan that is essentially the equivalent of getting the data card. The user agreement of some of the PDA data plans does say there are actually limits to the "unlimited" data. Not sure if you are on AT&T or which plan you have, but thought I'd let you know in case.
jomo25 said:
Just an FYI - if you use that much data xfer, dont be surprised if AT&T force-switches you to a more "appropriate" plan
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's a valid point and it's a calculated risk If this happens, I'll just cancel my data plan and go with some other solution. Fortunately, I'm not under a contract with AT&T.
jomo25 said:
Just an FYI - if you use that much data xfer, dont be surprised if AT&T force-switches you to a more "appropriate" plan. There have been documented cases where AT&T will audit data usage and if you are on a plan that is "unlimited" but only for data usage from the phone, they will change you over to the data plan that is essentially the equivalent of getting the data card. The user agreement of some of the PDA data plans does say there are actually limits to the "unlimited" data. Not sure if you are on AT&T or which plan you have, but thought I'd let you know in case.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've heard rumors of such "documented cases" but do you actually know anyone this has happened to? Has it eer happened to anyone on this board?
I find this happends on my phone too.
When it does i just try to make sure all other features are off, like bluetooth and wifi, and turning screen brightness off, and of course pressing the power button so that the screen off altogether.
You can get 2800mAh batteries from ebay for about a tenner which I think I'll get, that way if I am loosing charge it doesnt matter so much as I will still have loads left.
seb
Farsquidge said:
If you require such an intensive data connection wouldn't it be better to invest in a PCMCIA HSDPA card?
You are pushing the phone way beyond recommended limits and the heat alone will probably fry the Tx or battery or some other circuit.
Just a thought.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tether my phone 7 hours a day during the week and it doesn't get hot enough to hurt anything. Please don't spread misinformation like this as it's simply not true.
If it does the same thing with an AC charger and BT connection, I would suggest that maybe your phone is defective. Mine will charge while tethered and continues charging (up) on HSPDA or any other connection type even if I'm talking on my BT headset at the same time.
It's a pretty well known fact that charging via USB cable connected to a USB device is slower than charging via the wall charger. So why not follow the instructions to setup tethering via Wi-Fi as specified in this thread?
With this, you can tether as many computers as you want all at the same time and still be charging.
Hope this helps...
Same behavior observed here with both Hermes and Kaiser
5V 1A power supply and Kaiser doing tethered 3G data via BT will discharge the battery. I see battery discharge when docked to a 2A 5V supply and talking BT on 3G while DirectPush runs.
IMO, HTC caps the total power consumption and sacrifices battery charging when the total exceeds ~1A
Richard
I'm in San Diego, CA this weekend for a NPPL event (national pro paint-ball) and sitting here in the hotel tethering my laptop to my Tilt. So between beers (and NO it's not the beers talking now), I had to reset my Tilt so I pull the USB plug and noticed within a few seconds the H icon on the taskbar changes back to the 3G icon, I thought nothing of it.
I soft rest, plug in, noticed 3G, did a few things, still 3G, activesync complete, still 3G, fire up Internet Sharing and press Connect.... BAM! HSDPA icon and H icon within a second or two. So I further the test.... unplug, replug, start internet sharing, stop it, plug in/plug out.....
EVERY SINGLE TIME... H for tethering, 3G when not tethering.
Now of course, this could just be a total fluke, I will have to test again in another environment and see if I can reproduce. Also, I was able to get both 3G and HSDPA when the Tilt was not plugged in or tethering so I'm not saying that the device only gets higher speeds when tethered.
What was so interesting was the timing, if it was a fluke, it was a very cool one!
Has anybody else ever seen this before?
One side note... San Diego is the home of Qualcomm, the manufacturer of the processor powering the TYTN II/Kaiser/Tilt device. I know this has nothing to do with the spookiness of the icon above but now it's the beer talking, so time to sign off.....
When I'm not actually using data, my Tilt shows "3G". When I do anything that requires data use (web page, email, etc) it changes to "H". Sounds about like the same thing you have going on - when you're phone's not using data, it's sitting at the "3G", but when you're tethered, and using data, it's showing that "H" is in use...
This is normal.
On mine, when I don't have a data connection I have the 3G symbol, when I activate a data connection it will access the fastest (HSDPA if available).
I have noticed that if the HSDPA signal is weak (distance = greater packet rejection) on pure battery I only get a 3G connection, then when a cable is plugged in (power or USB) the extra power available while charging, increases the signal strength and I get HSDPA.
Maybe it was the same at the location you were.
That is the way "H" works. The cell you are connected to offers 3g and throttles up to "H" when data is tranferred. If you had accessed the web on your device when untethered, it would have changed to H as it transferred data also.
i know you asked about tethering.
but my tilt will jump in and out of HSDPA and 3G constantly during any data usage, tethered or not. However it is dependent on location, as in San Diego downtown I get H the whole time(that i paid attention to it), and when I was in North County, 20-30 miles north of downtown I get 3G/H in and out even during constant data transfer(streaming audio)
unwired4 said:
That is the way "H" works. The cell you are connected to offers 3g and throttles up to "H" when data is tranferred. If you had accessed the web on your device when untethered, it would have changed to H as it transferred data also.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Never really noticed it before, I just sometimes notice the H, I never put it together that it ramped up during data transfer only. thanks for the info...
It swaps to HSDPA for only as long as it needs to download what it's working on... when you tether your phone you're doing lots of data, so H shows up more.
If you have HSDPA enabled, you'll see it using HSDPA when you use standard data connections from the handset -- but keep in mind, HSDPA & 3g are harder to get good connections for then Edge/gprs... I get HSDPA in my living room, but I swap between 3G/GPRS when I browse the same websites from my basement -- due to the weaker signal strength...
I ran a speed test at mobilespeedtest.com and got this
I think its way too good to be true, is anyone else at this speed?
kylez64 said:
I ran a speed test at mobilespeedtest.com and got this
I think its way too good to be true, is anyone else at this speed?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If it goes through a proxy it will screw things up. I once did a GPRS test (on an SE W580i) and got 40kbps with the SE browser. On opera mini it would tell me I was on 56MB
I did the test off and on now with around the same results
it says compared to other isps its about 9 times faster, i thought for sure there was an error, or just extremely lucky.
kylez64 said:
I did the test off and on now with around the same results
it says compared to other isps its about 9 times faster, i thought for sure there was an error, or just extremely lucky.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
try some other speed test site
mobilespeedtest.com says my 3g speed is 11907 Kbps oO
lukluk says my max speed is 619 Kbps
Xtreme lab's speedtest app says my d/l speed is 447 Kbits/s
speed testing - the badass way
Okay if you want to do this right, first turn off any compression you may have enabled in Connections. Tether up a laptop with wmwifirouter (grab a trial). Might as well turn up your wifi strength on the phone but that may not matter. On the computer make sure you've got no crap running in the background that uses bandwidth including IM and p2p obviously on either the phone or the computer. Fire up a browser and do multiple tests from multiple servers on http://speakeasy.net/speedtest.
When you're done, for good measure, repeat but tethering through usb not wifi. I believe wifi may be faster than wifi and it does matter when you're testing a connection with possible but very unlikely throughput in the neighborhood of six bonded T1 lines.
Doug
edit: Sometimes carriers and ISPs cheat on their customers' bandwidth testing by packet bursting, shaping, throttling and proxy tricks. Since you're seeing insane (and most likely erroneous) speed results and if you want to bother getting to the bottom of this, in addition or instead of doing what I said, tether up with your computer, install this little simple bandwidth meter (on the computer) which I attached and download this 256.5MB copy of OpenBSD from this mirror on your computer:
ftp://filedump.se.rit.edu/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/amd64/install45.iso
And watch your bandwidth meter. Also fire up your best stopwatch and clock the full download and do some math to get the speed.
While you're at it figure out a way to upload a >10MB file somewhere and clock that too. Be advised your throughput testing may be confounded by the time of day and your carrier's network saturation in addition to your signal strength which might vary if you've got your laptop screen in between your phone and the path to the nearest tower.
Wow I guess I turned this into a big project.
edit: if you don't have access to another machine or are too lazy to do the tethering thing at least use dslreports/mspeed to download a 1MB test as opposed to mobilespeedtest.com's 512KB.
d0ugie said:
Okay if you want to do this right, first turn off any compression you may have enabled in Connections. Tether up a laptop with wmwifirouter (grab a trial). Might as well turn up your wifi strength on the phone but that may not matter. On the computer make sure you've got no crap running in the background that uses bandwidth including IM and p2p obviously on either the phone or the computer. Fire up a browser and do multiple tests from multiple servers on http://speakeasy.net/speedtest.
When you're done, for good measure, repeat but tethering through usb not wifi. I believe wifi may be faster than wifi and it does matter when you're testing a connection with possible but very unlikely throughput in the neighborhood of six bonded T1 lines.
Doug
edit: Sometimes carriers and ISPs cheat on their customers' bandwidth testing by packet bursting, shaping, throttling and proxy tricks. Since you're seeing insane (and most likely erroneous) speed results and if you want to bother getting to the bottom of this, in addition or instead of doing what I said, tether up with your computer, install this little simple bandwidth meter (on the computer) which I attached and download this 256.5MB copy of OpenBSD from this mirror on your computer:
ftp://filedump.se.rit.edu/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/amd64/install45.iso
And watch your bandwidth meter. Also fire up your best stopwatch and clock the full download and do some math to get the speed.
While you're at it figure out a way to upload a >10MB file somewhere and clock that too. Be advised your throughput testing may be confounded by the time of day and your carrier's network saturation in addition to your signal strength which might vary if you've got your laptop screen in between your phone and the path to the nearest tower.
Wow I guess I turned this into a big project.
edit: if you don't have access to another machine or are too lazy to do the tethering thing at least use dslreports/mspeed to download a 1MB test as opposed to mobilespeedtest.com's 512KB.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well I did this and got around 1-2 mbps witch is still very good for me
one can always dream though lol
What program are you using to achieve this?
Does this wear the battery down like wifi tether or if your phone is on usb the battery never drains faster than it can charge?
If the USB port you are connected to can supply the full 500mA, it will be enough power to run the tether and charge G1 (albeit very slowly). The battery will also warm up quite a bit (to about 50C). Sometimes the phone may get into a situation where it has not properly requested power from the USB controller and it will drain battery. Simply unplug and replug to fix that. It is also possible to charge faster than drain using Bluetooth tether.
The go to programs for root users would be Wireless Tether for Root and Wired Tether for Root. For stock users, check out PDAnet.
Thank you. It sounds like if I was going to set up a always on internet connection the BT is the way to go.
Here's what I'm thinking, when 7.2 becomes available from T-mo, make that my constant 24/7 connection for my desktop.
What's wrong with that plan?
jlacy76 said:
Thank you. It sounds like if I was going to set up a always on internet connection the BT is the way to go.
Here's what I'm thinking, when 7.2 becomes available from T-mo, make that my constant 24/7 connection for my desktop.
What's wrong with that plan?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There's still a hidden cap for the bandwidth I believe. Also, if you do any activity that requires low latency, wireless (as in cell, not wifi) probably won't work well.
Since this is sorta on the topic.. anyone know how to get the usb tethering feature an cyans rom to work? i click it, it makes sound on my lap top.. but then what?
edit: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=580181&highlight=usb+tethering
cigar3tte said:
There's still a hidden cap for the bandwidth I believe. Also, if you do any activity that requires low latency, wireless (as in cell, not wifi) probably won't work well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My thinking was just another g1 and use my other g1 for telephone etc. This would just replace my dsl.
Wifi tether drains my battery faster than it can charge, so what are my options?
jlacy76 said:
Wifi tether drains my battery faster than it can charge, so what are my options?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Use a dual input USB cable, like those for portable hard drives (example here). Or go over bluetooth. Or go over USB in cyan's roms.
jlacy76 said:
Thank you. It sounds like if I was going to set up a always on internet connection the BT is the way to go.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You'd probably want to use the USB instead of BT, as using the BT radio will cause additional heat generation. BT 2.1+EDR also has a hard bandwidth cap of 3Mbps (your actual thoroughput may be even lower depending on the amount of WiFi interference in your area)
Here's what I'm thinking, when 7.2 becomes available from T-mo, make that my constant 24/7 connection for my desktop.
What's wrong with that plan?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As stated already, the first problem would be the 10GB bandwidth cap/throttle. Secondly, it's likely you'll be getting less than 7.2 at times other than at night if you are in an urban area. Finally, your rt ping will be pretty poor compared to a wired internet service. That can translate into a sluggish browsing experience.
I can say all of the above because I am actually using HSDPA as my home internet access now (not staying where I am long enough to justify a DSL installation and contract).
I saw that in the Cyan roms and that was one of the things that triggered this search.
Even if I had 1.5 down that would be fine. 7.2 would be better but we'll have to wait and see on the cap.
The real question for me is which method won't run the battery down faster than it can charge?
Required:
- Running on N1
- Silently in the background, continuously, doing a very little and bandwidth limited download process
- The download process will not use SD space at all or will use a very little space and not growing in space
Optional:
- Can set the timer of that continuously download process
- Have an icon (widget?) to monitor it
Why do i need that?
Because i want that H "downlink and uplink icon" go online all the time even when my internet is idle. Currently, if my internet is idle, H icon will empty, and then when i'm trying to use internet there is an annoying establishing connection process for like 10 or 20 seconds before i can actually use the internet.
Thanks before.
you want to be connected to hsdpa all the time , hmm i get the point but wouldn't it drain the battery faster?
Yeah. But sometime i need that, for example when i'm tethering it while i'm charging it next to my laptop.
l1k3m1k3 said:
Yeah. But sometime i need that, for example when i'm tethering it while i'm charging it next to my laptop.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
tethering has priority over sleeping, im pretty sure its supposed to stay on and connected when tethering. If it is losing connection its probably a signal strength/location issue.
Yeah. But also, there are other scenarios where i prefer speed over the battery.
Any idea what app i should look?
Run "ping" from a command line to any server out there (www.google.com for example), and enjoy constant connection
But I suggest looking into your settings, there is no good reason why HSPDA connection initialization should take more than a couple of seconds.
Complaint to your network operator!
The network operator should manage the connections timers to avoid long connections times...
If the amount of data in buffer is below some threshold the configuration in the network shold move you to a low capacity common channel (FACH), after that, if the amount of data is zero, you change to a state called cell_pch, where you still have the connection but don't use physical resources. You should be in this state for a couple of hours before being disconnected.
it shoudnt takes more than 1 sec to be on HSDPA again!!
Complaint to your network operator!
Yeah.
Thanks for the help guys.