It is easy to believe that your service provider has to be at fault for your low 4G connectivity. But before that, you can always go for a few troubleshooting steps to reboot your 4G connectivity.

Ever since 4G was launched in India, mobile 4G internet speeds have considerably improved. Reports of poor 4G connectivity may have come up, but service providers have smoothly managed to maintain minimum average speeds of 10Mbps.

If your 3G or 4G download speeds are declining or your mobile web browsing experience is not up to the mark, its time that you adopt a few hacks before approaching your service provider.

Change Phone Settings

4G networks were available long before in the mid and high-end mobile device range much before the grand 4G launch in India. However, if your old mobile device supports 4G you need not buy a new phone. Just shuffle your phone’s settings to gain access to the 4G settings.

Just got to settings>mobile networks>preferred network type and choose 4G.

Another important task for you is to check that your phone’s APN (Access Point Network) settings are set to default. Doing so makes sure that your phone’s using the right APN information to help connect your phone to the wireless network.

To set the APN settings to default mode, go to settings>mobile networks>Access Point Names>tap on the menu icon and select reset to default.

APN information consists of the user’s IP address and helps to connect to the right internet gateway.

Best Quality Phone Antennas

Buying phones with good antennas can decrease your chances of having low 4G connectivity. Poor quality antennas are one of the reasons for erratic broadband speeds. Most mobile manufacturers today try to cut down costs by providing low-quality antennas offered by the chip makers.

So there are chances that your phone may have poor quality antennae despite housing a high-speed processor. In most remote areas, the phones with such antennae suffer from low signal reception that results in low broadband speeds. So, next time when you buy a new phone, you must keep this knowledge handy although you can’t do much which your old phone.

Watch The Data Cap

All data plans offered by service providers come with a data speed limit called ‘data cap’. Beyond this data cap, your internet speeds begin to drop over a period of usage in a month. There are ways in which you can determine whether it is a temporary glitch or not. Netflix’s fast speed test app and speedtest.net can help you to check your internet’s speed a number of times before you arrive at a conclusion on your phone’s speed.

You can also check your internet speed via the service provider’s USSD codes and on their website in your account.

Management of Apps

Apps such as FB and Instagram often have the tendency of automatically updating videos and posts. This is a potential form of memory consumption that eats up a major chunk of your phone’s data thus lowering your phone’s internet speed.

One hack to overcome this problem is by tweaking the video auto-play settings and reducing data wastage.

Browsers like Chrome and Opera have means by which they can reduce web-page download time using the data saver mode. Netflix also uses a trick by which it can stream hours long video within a minimum data usage of 1GB.