What part of your process gets you around deprioritization? I thought that there was no way to circumvent that. I had to tether for a month or two on tmo and as soon as I hit 22 or 25GB my entire account was throttled and I'd barely get 2MBps. I wound up going with an ATT ipad plan that also had deprio at a point (30gb? I forget). But everything about the ATT plan was so much better.
I tried a lot of ways to get around that (most of what you mentioned, tweaking my hops and what not) and never made any progress so I assumed it was at the network level and I'd have no control.
Deprioritization is handled at the cell site and is per-sector/per-band. It's handled on the radio layer and what usually appears to happen is the network will only allocate you a few physical resource blocks. So speeds will vary based on what modulation your device can get away with and how busy things are. The only 'official' post on the topic I can think of: https://newsroom.sprint.com/protecting-the-97.htm
If you live in a populated city or need to go through an airport with a phone subject to deprio you're going to have a bad time with speeds.
If you're like me and live on a mountain surrounded by trees with a line of sight to the tower down the hill, deprio isn't going to matter.
I tried a lot of ways to get around that (most of what you mentioned, tweaking my hops and what not) and never made any progress so I assumed it was at the network level and I'd have no control.