Make your internet speed faster by unplugging your phones
TLDR;
If your internet is slow try disconnecting your phones from the power source. That will stop backup and sync services on your phone. See if it improves your internet speed.
The long version;
Over the last few days, my internet has been flaky. While working on my Mac, my internet speed would come down to a screeching halt with recurrent timeout errors and partial page loads. Clearly it was very frustrating and a huge drag on productivity. I did the usual tests and everything looked OK. Speed tests reported what they report best — the maximum upload and download bandwidth I’m currently getting. The speed tests were in line with whatever my ISP had promised.
Like any other self respecting ex-engineer, I thought I’ll do basic investigation before I call my ISP. I don’t enjoy calling customer service unless I’m cornered. I fired up terminal and started a bunch of simple tests (ping google.com). The average ping response time was between 400–900ms. Not good. Usually I get 18–30ms on a regular day.
I fired up Activity Monitor and it didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. I did a few more tests but found nothing interesting. Now I was cornered and called the ISP. Luckily it was not painful and they told me that I’m using all my upload bandwidth, and that is exactly the reason for my agonizing internet experience.
Hmm. I was not actively uploading anything for sure from my Mac. I took their lead to figure out which particular device was the culprit. We’ve 3 Macs and 4 iOS devices in our household. There is no Terminal or Activity Monitor on iOS. I had to fall back on something extremely scientific — switch off wifi on all iOS devices, one at time! While disabling wifi one by one, I was constantly looking at the ping results on Terminal. All of a sudden, almost magically the response time settled back to the usual 18–30ms. My internet was back to its original glory. Switching on the wifi made the internet slow again.
Needless to say, disabling wifi on the device was not the solution I was looking for.
Now that I had identified the culprit device, I wondered why is my iOS device so busy. Backup and sync comes to mind immediately. I had set up iCloud backup and Google Photos sync. I researched the Internet on how sync is kicked off for these services. Although I couldn’t find any official documentation, it seems that they generally follow these rules to kick off sync -
- The device is powered on.
- The device is connected to the internet via wifi.
- The device is connected to a power source.
My next test was to disconnect the device from the power source. As I had anticipated, the speed increased immediately. It felt like now I’ve a remote to increase and decrease my internet speed.
While switching off wifi is not an acceptable solution, unplugging the device when I’m actively working on other devices is definitely a decent compromise. Unless I’m traveling out of town, I don’t end up draining a lot of battery.
Why does using all my upload bandwidth degrade my browsing experience? Browsing and watching videos should not depend on upload traffic. Right?
Wrong.
After researching online and chatting with ISP support, I came to the following conclusion -
Normally, asking to see a website or video doesn’t use a whole lot of upload bandwidth. However, when your upload is saturated, whenever you do anything that requires upload, it’s placed in a queue and has to wait it’s turn.
So although your download is not directly affected, the upload that normally initiates that request is, which causes delays.
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On a related note, my current routine was exacerbating the situation. I end up listening to audiobooks at bedtime and they work great as a sleeping aid for me. While listening to audiobooks, I don’t want want the charging cable hanging around my neck. Therefore I end up draining battery at night and charging them when I’m working on my Mac. For me the sync triggers at exactly the time I don’t want it to trigger.
I think this particular problem will aggravate with increasingly higher quality photos and videos (4k videos on 6s).
Unless smartphones become a bit more smarter in triggering sync, an effective way to improve your overall browsing speed is to simply unplug them.
Or, you can be more virtuous — avoid the sin of bringing your phones to bed. Let them charge and sync overnight.
