Hi, I followed you here,
Tether is you are using your phone as a router, right?
Probably has to do with the quality of the connection, maybe when you tested your phone your wifi signal was significantly worse than when you tested it as a tether, usually happens, wifi of most phones are weaker than laptops, so at a certain distance of your router you have better speed at the laptop than the phone. I remember the first time I came across an iPhone in my house, I have perfectly good signal on my macbook, and no signal at all in the iPhone, now they are closer but still weaker. When you use your phone as a router you are sitting right next to the notebook, and with your phone on the same desk or in your pocket, less than a meter away, the wifi signal won't be limiting the connection.
Usually speed tests are done connected directly to the modem, so you only account for the modem/connection speed, then if you have troubles with wifi, speed or timing, you find it later analyzing the wifi network, and you don't get confused by numbers, as when you measure the noise of a complete system you don't know where it's coming from so that info isn't useful to get it better, only to know where you are standing.
I can imagine why the phone LTE upload speeds are much faster than the wired service, the protocol it's a more modern design, and now days the interaction with the internet is much more giving than it was few years back, when all the house services standards were designed, now days makes more sense to have upload speeds closer to download speeds, it didn't before since we just uploaded a few pictures and SD videos 10 minutes max (stupid rule of youtube back then). Now day any video we film in our phones, not even a good camera, is full HD and could be half an hour of we talking or a live concert of a friend, uploading that or sending it to the guy playing takes a fair amount of time. Modern service are being designed to be more symmetrical, I still believe we always download more than upload, for the exception of broadcasting, or people who uses a connection at the office only for his youtube channel, since now are people day working on that.
Phones seems to be more compatible with that more modern way of using the web, I didn't tested my phone connection in a while, but I'm lucky if I get full HSDPA service.
Right now, 3am here are my numbers:
Ping Download Upload
phone wifi: 70 ms 16.6 Mbps 2.9 Mbps
phone H 232 ms 4.1 Mbps 1.1 Mbps
PC wired 25 ms 12.5 Mbps 2.3 Mbps
All this with al my tabs and apps opened so I could squeeze a little bit more but I think its fine. The phone over wifi could be marking higher than wired but I think it's because smaller package are used and a peak as high as 100Mbps on the computer was shown at the start of the test. Ping are pretty useful in some cases, like Skype talks or online games, not at all when watching a video or downloading big files, also as a different way of measurement was used by the phone maybe the server used was closer. In daytime I would expect lower marks but I use the most of it about this time so, who cares. HSDPA looks bit better than 3G which max is 3.5Mbps but still not that grater in my case, your LTE shows much better performance. I never get EDGE connection anymore since I have dual sim on my phone so when only 2G available I don't have internet unless I change the sim profile, maybe better not to scratch my head trying to use that anyway...
I still should stick to my house server, in your case if you don't need the internet when you are not home probably not so much, I don't know about ping on your service, but probably better than mine. Still in my case, if it were just me I probably could keep only my phone service which is much cheaper than the house service, that's about one third, about 5USD+IVA(1.35USD) for the phone, IVA comes back later since it's from a company, about 20USD for the house connection, we could discuss the conversion rates I used but they are good for a reference, not official rate but isn't the official rate what makes everything else equal, if you want to buy something. As I said my roommate service doesn't work at all so we keep it, still would be cheaper to pay him an extra service for his phone than paying my half of the other but, isn't that expensive anyway so I still use both.
That's long enough, I didn't notice...
JS
