I was watching something on my phone and turned off my WiFi so that cellular data could load it instead (which was quicker at the time). But if it can use both separately then why can’t my phone do both at once and load things faster?
In: Technology
The short answer is that it can, but it doesn’t. In much of the world, cellular data isn’t unlimited, so to help consumers (really to prevent angry customers) out of the box phones use a single connection at a time for internet. It also has a CPU cost to re-assemble the data, so it does kill your battery quickly.
On the other hand, if you plug an Ethernet cable into your laptop while remaining on WiFi, it absolutely will use both connections when appropriate. You usually can’t tell because the wired connection is typically faster than anything on the internet, but if you transfer large files to something local, you can see it performing faster than either connection individually. Because of the cellular internet cost, however, a laptop with a cellular modem will only connect via it when no other connection is available or reliable.
Edit: there is at least a few cell phones that actually could be set to use both cellular and WiFi simultaneously, some of the last Nokia Lumia and the HP Elite x3, the last of the Windows Phone.
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