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Saturday, October 26, 2013

[Rant] OMG! My iPhone 5S' SoftBank LTE speeds got so slow!

Yesterday, while I was at work, I felt the browsing speeds of my iPhone 5S had gotten terribly slow. So slow, that it was way slower than my iPhone 4S which itself was terrible on the crappy SoftBank network. At first I thought it had something to do with the SoftBank's LTE network. I saw so worried that it was becoming like the 3G network.

I rebooted the phone. That was the first time I had rebooted the phone manually. But it didn't fix the problem. I was worried that it was because I updated the 7.0.3 the previous day and there was a bug in it. With a lot of effort (because of the slowness), I googled to see if there was such an issue. No such issue was reported. 

Worse case would be having to restore the OS. But before that, there was a simple thing I could do. I could reset the network settings and see. I did that, and it seemed to fix the issue. I couldn't use the phone extensively, but it seemed to have fixed. On my way home, I tried to download an app from the App Store. I do not remember how big the app was though. I entered the elevator while it was downloading, and the download halted mid-way. I couldn't resume it though. Luckily, I could watch the PC Perspective stream on the AMD R9 290X's release. But when I got off the train, it stopped working again. I mean, it became very slow. 

Resetting the network settings didn't fix it this time. I knew I had to do a restore. I restored the factory settings and restored the backup. It still didn't work. Then restored it again, but didn't restore the backup. It still didn't work!

Just to be sure, I ran Speed Test from the phone. I was baffled by the results. The download speed was a mere 30Kbps!!! The upload speed was not affected. It was doing well above 5Mbps. 


Then it struck me! Could I have exhausted the 7.5GB monthly download limit before the speeds got capped? But when I checked the status from the SoftBank website, it said I had another 3.66GB left before the speeds got capped.


I didn't know what to do. I called SoftBank's customer support. I explained the situation. He checked how much GBs were left for me this month. There obviously was no issue. But then he said that there was another condition! I was not supposed to download more than a total of 1GB in 3 consecutive days or else the speeds would get capped until the 4th day dawned!!!! But even then, your download quote for the 4th days was 1GB - (day 1 + day2)'s download. So basically, if had downloaded 100MB, 100MB, 800MB, I'm screwed for the next couple of days because 800MB of the quota is already filled!!! Oh dear! 

SoftBank doesn't show the daily downloads though. I wonder if there is a free app for that. If there isn't, then the whole App ecosystem is a worthless pile of crap!

Anyways, I'm going to stop the phone from downloading app updates automatically when I'm connected to the internet via LTE. I can wait till I got home to do that.

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