On Tue, 22 Jan 2013, Ryan Coleman wrote:

> I'd bet that he's really just in possession of a bad phone.
>
> If no WiFi it will go to Mobile - unless it has teamed up with an SSID. 
> It's not going to multi-home you to the net. That's a massive battery 
> draw.


Thanks to those of you who persisted in accusing my phone of causing the 
problem.  You were right.


I wondered what would happen if I were to reboot the phone.  It doesn't 
seem to have a reboot option, but it can be powered off and turned back 
on, so that's what I did.  When it came back on, I had 3G in my house. 
Before restarting, I had no data service in my house (unless I used my 
WiFi).

I wonder how often the phone needs to be restarted.  It wasn't giving me 
any data service in my home on the day I bought it.  I had no internet 
with my home wifi at that time.  I bought it one week ago today, so from a 
few hours after I bought it, until now, it was not working properly.

Now I can do speed tests at home.  The result is excellent.  I downloaded 
the speedtest.net app for Android and used that.

On the ground floor of my home, I see either 3G or H (I assume H is 
T-Mobile's HSPA+); it flips from one to the other.  These are the median 
results of three speed tests:

3G or H:

       ping:  700 ms
   download: 11.5 Mbps
     upload:  1.5 Mbps

That is very fast.  I even have some data service in the basement, but I 
see only "E" instead of 3G.  E seems to stand for EDGE.  This is what I 
get for speed:

E:

       ping: 600 ms
   download: 100 Kbps
     upload:  50 Kbps

Using the terminal window, with the 3G service, I tested the ping time to 
the server in my office, because that's the main ping time that will 
matter to me -- it showed a mean ping of 483 ms with 0% packet loss. 
That's not so great, but I probably won't be doing a lot of ssh to the 
office, so it might not matter.  The throughput is more important.

Surprisingly, the 3G gives a faster download time than my WiFi which has a 
very fast internet connection.  My laptop gets 35 Mbps to the internet on 
my WiFi, but this is what I see on the Nexus 4 phone:

WiFi:

       ping:  100 ms
   download: 10.0 Mbps
     upload: 14.8 Mbps

So the WiFi download speed is about 10% slower than 3G, but the WiFi 
upload speed is about 10 times faster than 3G and equal to what I see on 
my laptop.  I wonder why I don't see a faster download time with WiFi on 
the Nexus 4.  My guess is that its WiFi hardware just won't go faster than 
about 10.

One more thing -- I can use the Nexus 4 as a WiFi access point for my 
Ubuntu laptop.  Using 3G on the Nexus 4, I connect with the laptop and do 
pings and speed tests from the laptop.  I see basically the same as I saw 
with the 3G tests -- about 10 Mbps down and about 1.5 Mbps up.  That's a 
really cool feature, to say the least.  I also tried using VNC over an SSH 
tunnel on the laptop via the Android access point over 3G and it was quite 
comfortable to use, so the 500 ms pings weren't a big issue.


Obviously, this means that my opinion of T-Mobile just increased by leaps 
and bounds.  I'm still not going to pay $300 extra for the Nexus 4 -- they 
overcharged me -- but I probably will try to stick with this Nexus 4 
device and T-Mobile carrier.


Many thanks to all of you for your help with this!

Mike