# Laptop tethered to phone.  Laptop browser faster ?  Why ?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 10, 2013, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977 "2013-12-10T14:33:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![simple\_homer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@simple\_homer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simple_homer)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977/1 "2013-12-10T14:33:17Z")

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I am traveling, and for internet access I am using my laptop tethered to my android phone.  
Surfing the internet on my laptop is much faster than on the phone.  
Pages load faster, etc.  
Why would there be such a difference in speed ?

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**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977/2 "2013-12-10T14:34:43Z")

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Presumably, your laptop has a lot more processing power than your phone.

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**Author:** ![Habeed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a587f6/32.png) [@Habeed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Habeed)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977/3 "2013-12-10T14:38:46Z")

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For a given generation of processor, processing power is proportional to power consumption.

So if you phone is the same age as your laptop, and the laptop draws 10 times as much power, the laptop will be about 8 times faster. (not 10 times because x86 chips have overhead because they have to translate the x86 instructions to the actual RISC instructions they really use, and this costs power to do)

Notice how your laptop is big and heavy compared to your phone? And the battery is much bigger than your entire phone? That’s where the power is coming from.

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**Author:** ![simple\_homer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@simple\_homer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simple_homer)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977/4 "2013-12-10T14:52:37Z")

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Thanks for the common sense answers that have obviously eluded me 🙂

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**Author:** ![GreasyJack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/df705f/32.png) [@GreasyJack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreasyJack)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977/5 "2013-12-10T15:45:15Z")

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Mobile browsers also usually have pretty tiny caches, so they have to re-download a lot more of the website components than the regular browser in your laptop does.

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**Author:** ![ctnguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@ctnguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ctnguy)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laptop-tethered-to-phone-laptop-browser-faster-why/675977/6 "2013-12-10T17:00:14Z")

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And just to clarify why processing power matters: a substantial portion of the time that websites take to load can be in rendering the HTML code to what is displayed on the screen, and in running any Javascript code that runs on the page.