Poor performance with portable wifi hot spot. Is this normal? I'm using an HTC Desire HD to create a portable wifi hotspot on a 2G connection (yes, I know, but its all I got sometimes) so I can use my laptop for simple internet based tasks.  My 2G connection on the phone seems to max out at about 40kbps (unrelated, but is this normal?).  However, the connection is pretty much unusable by my laptop which seems to gain a maximum of about 300 bytes/sec download speed (strangely though, it gets almost 4kbps upload).

So,
1) Any idea what's wrong?
2) If the phone's 2g connection is capable of 40kpbs, is it reasonable to expect a portable wifi hotspot client to be able to use all of this capacity?

Thanks!
In theory you should get full speed but this things can be dodgy sometimes. Make sure you make these speedtests at the same spot and at the same time to avoid congestion and diffrent signal strenghts effecting the test.

You can try USB tethering and see if the speed improves. If you can't find usb tethering in settings there are apps that should allow you to try this.

You can also try to put the phone to a better spot (signal wise) when using the wifi tether.

On an unrelated note, please try to be more precise when using units such as kbps. You used bits 3 times and byte once. A small(normal) b means a bit and a large(capital) B a Byte. One Byte is 8 bits. 40 kbps (kilo bits per seconds) is 5kB/s(kilo bytes per seconds). Please do the tests again and edit your question with the correct numbers with correct units or post in a comment.

It is also possible that your computer is doing some stuff (such as cheking for windows updates or antivirus definitions) that might effect your speedtest. Also the compter might show the results in a diffent unit than your phone, so the numbers are smaller but the speed is the same.