OnePlus 8T hotspot and tether

I recently upgraded my phone from a Samsung S9+ to a OnePlus 8T thanks to a pretty good T-Mobile trade-in deal.  So far I have been happy with my OnePlus 8T, but based on my research I knew that I would lose the ability to share a wi-fi connection.

For anyone that has not used wi-fi sharing on Samsung (or other devices that support it) basically you use your phone to connect to wi-fi, then you turn on your phone hotspot feature to share your connection to other devices.  Why would you do this?  Here are a few possible scenarios that it could help:

1) On travel, you might have devices that do not work well with wi-fi connections that direct to a login page (hotels for example).

2) On travel, out of just being lazy, you rather not configure multiple devices (laptops, tablets for kids, game systems).

Really the why is not important.  In my case, the important thing is that the OnePlus 8T does not support this feature.  When you are connected to wi-fi and try to enable your mobile hotspot, your wi-fi connection is turned off.  However, when I was looking at my OnePlus 8T options I noticed an interesting option labeled "Ethernet tethering" which got me interested in exactly what I could do.  Luckily I happened to have a HooToo USB-C hub ( HT-UC011 ) with an Ethernet connector.  So, to get right into it here are a few connectivity options I tested.

Laptop > USB-C hub (Ethernet) >  OnePlus 8T (Wi-Fi)

So this was a simple setup.  I used an ethernet cable to connect a laptop to the HooToo USB-C hub, which was connected to my OnePlus 8T.  The OnePlus 8T was connected to my home internet using wifi, and the "Ethernet tethering" option was turned on.  Using this setup, I was able to get online.  I used the Fast app (and fast.com website) and the download speeds were exactly the same and upload was about 0.3 Mbps faster on the phone.  The unloaded latency went from 13ms on the phone to 25ms on the laptop.  One quick note, my laptop was setup to DHCP and I didn't have to do any manual configuration for things like IP address or DNS.

Laptop > USB-C hub (Ethernet) > OnePlus 8T (Cellular)

Since I basically had everything setup from the prior test, I disabled wi-fi on my phone so it would go to cellular signal.  On my T-Mobile plan I have unlimited 3G tether so I knew the speed would take a huge hit.  The laptop Fast.com test got 540 Kbps.

OnePlus 8T > USB-C hub (Ethernet) > Home network

Just to continue testing, I connected USB-C hub to my home wi-fi router using Ethernet.  I also disabled cellular data and w-fi on my phone, and it seems that my phone was using the Ethernet for internet connectivity.

Laptop (Wi-Fi) > OnePlus 8T (Hotspot mode) > USB-C hub (Ethernet) > Home network

Once I was able to get my phone using ethernet for Internet access, I decided to turn on the hotspot mode to see what would happen.  My laptop was able to connect to the wi-fi hotspot, and based on some quick tests it seems that I was using my home network connect to get to the Internet.  Basically my phone was acting like a portable wi-fi router, similar to my RAVPower FileHub.

So that is the testing I have done so far.