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VERY slow, mostly fails tethering...

I’m hoping this is something intuitively obvious to everybody else, that I’m missing…
Moto g7 Power, Visible (which is Verizon towers)

In THEORY, I should be able to tether this phone to my laptop and get whatever capability Visible has. I can’t.

Tether, fire up Firefox or Chrome, and it sits. It takes forever for “establishing secure connection “ to go away. Usually, it fails and I get:

Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to testmy.net. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

The website owners are GOOGLE! Or testmy.net, or pretty much ANY SITE.

This afternoon, from CHROME I got:

This site can’t be reachedtestmy.net unexpectedly closed the connection.
Try:
Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED

When it DOES connect, EVERYTHING is slow. Put in an address and it sometimes says it’s “performing TLS handshake” with somebody. Then it eventually connects or fails.

It’s NOT THE LAPTOP. When I connect to the house wireless THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. When I connect through a DIFFERENT cell phone ON THE SAME VISIBLE NETWORK, THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. My wife has a Moto G7 and HERS works DRASTICALLY better than mine.

We also have a cheap ZTE Blade A7 Prime (again, Visible) for a data phone and IT WORKS FINE.

None of them are BLINDING fast, but MY G7 totally sucks.

And turning on the hotspot isn't much, if ANY, better...

WHAT am I likely to have set wrong or running on my G7 that’s causing such garbage performance?
 
There's no router. Cell phone directly into laptop.

It's Visible. "contact Visible cellular and have someone there look" means you're not familiar with them... They DON'T have a phone. You contact them by chat. Chat so slow glaciers seem speedy. Chat that often goes unresponded to for MINUTES or longer. I've ALREADY had a 2-hour chat that ended up with "tickets" being sent to their "network engineers" about why in general the service is slow. The response after several DAYS was "you're in a marginal area." I'm in a NOT marginal area, near Minneapolis, in the middle of a giant Verizon LTE bubble that WASN'T marginal on Verizon using ancient Samsung GS5s. Unfortunately, once the geniuses have spoken that "marginal" excuse gets used for EVERY issue.

SO, back to the original problem:
I have THREE devices. - one ZTE A7 Prime, and TWO Moto G7s. The A7 Prime is OK. Not GREAT by any stretch, but not as much of a worthless pig as MY G7. The SECOND Moto G7 is likewise adequate - again NOT blinding fast, but NOT as slow to connect, error inducing, and generally crap as a tethered data device as this one. As it says above, it takes FOREVER to connect to a site, it errors out most of the time, it disconnects frequently, has marginal throughput, though ONCE CONNECTED it sometimes shows similar throughput numbers as the other 2 devices. It's SO poor it buffers regularly trying to run a RADIO stream - NOT a 1080 or even 720P HD TV stream, a RADIO STREAM.

At this point, I'll I'm trying to figure out is WHAT'S DIFFERENT that's causing this one to be generating the errors above, and be incredibly slow connecting to websites and such, as opposed to the other two devices.

Yes, I can have ANOTHER interminable "chat" with a CSR (being charitable) at Visible, but I figure the odds that being productive are astronomically low. Thus my question here. If nobody here has any ideas, I'll dump the thing back to factory reset (I presume there is one), see if THAT makes any difference, and go from there.

And FWIW, the hotspot isn't much, if any, better - it just drops more frequently and equally randomly.
 
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