4G WiFi connection drops to 512Kbps after waking form power save.

Hello everyone,

I've been fighting with my ISP for months over this, but it just might turn out that they may be telling the truth for once.

Basically, I have an unlimited mobile 4G plan with three SIMs, each of which is in a 4G Android phone, the hotspots of which I use alternately as and when needed.

In our household are two desktops and three laptops, all running Windows 10 Pro, and one laptop running Lubuntu.

In about November 2015, I started noticing that my connectivity speeds would drop from multiple gigabits per second to an average maximum of about 512kbps after a certain amount of data (usually two gigabytes downloaded and uploaded) has been consumed within the respective 24 hours; speed would go back up to 4G levels the moment the clock hits 12:00 AM every night. The throttling affects all machines and all SIMs.

I took on my ISP with this, and every agent I ever talked to said that they don't have a fair usage policy in place for subscribers of unlimited plan - in fact, that one of their marketing points; they even say so on their website. They firmly denied the implementation of a fair usage policy even after I showed them screenshots of the moment the connection speed dropped.

I even tried running YouTube continuously on my phones for a stretch of time to see what happens, with YouTube's autoplay feature turned on, and, indeed, I noticed that after a while of running videos at 1080p, I could barely run any videos at a resolution higher than 144p.

Then, today, as I was syncing my wife's OneDrive folder on her new account on one of the desktops, I noticed that the speed actually dropped only after I moved the mouse/pressed a key on the keyboard to wake the machine up from power-save mode (i.e. turn on the screen.) So I started having doubts as to where the problem actually lies - is it a setting on any or all of my PCs that I had overlooked somehow?

Any thoughts? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

you should check this out https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/928152 - hopefully it gives you more ideas, if not a direct answer

also, you could check off the button "allow windows to turn off this device to save power" via device management to see if it helps you at all.

When an 802.11 wireless network adapter that is set to use power save mode wants to enter a sleep state, the adapter indicates this intention to the wireless AP. The adapter does this by setting the power save option in its packets or in the 802.11 frames that it sends to the wireless AP. In this scenario, the following behavior should occur:
When the wireless AP receives the frames that have the power save option set, the wireless AP determines that the client network adapter that sent the frames wants to enter a power saving state.
The wireless AP then buffers packets that are destined for the client network adapter.
When the radio of the client network adapter turns on, the client network adapter then communicates with the AP to retrieve the buffered packets.
This behavior enables the wireless network adapter to use less power and to wake up periodically at the correct time to receive network traffic from the AP.

If the wireless AP does not support this feature correctly, the wireless AP continues to send packets to the client network adapter even if the client network adapter radio is turned off. Therefore, these packets are lost. In this scenario, the symptoms that you experience may vary depending on the phase of the wireless connection in which these packets are lost.

Yup. Already went through all that. Nothing in there that helps.