It’s my goddamn motherfucking mobile data and MY PHONE. I should be able to use it however I want. My wifi went down because the greedy, cunt-faced shitbags at Comcast stole taxpayer subsidies to enrich themselves instead of actually providing the service we’re paying for. I tried to switch to a mobile hotspot and my phone refuses to open one. Everyone responsible for this shit should be fed to alligators locked away in a fucking gulag. We have no rights and live in a corporate plutocracy.
Must be a USA thing, never heard of such a thing.
Same here.
Is this a USA only thing?
USA mobile carriers have been charging for tethering since devices implemented the tethering feature. Android enforced it through carrier firmware. I don’t remember how apple enforced it.
I remember having to jailbreak all my iPhones so I could get it for free. As iOS started feeling more limited, I bought a galaxy phone from Europe because the international phones didn’t have the carrier firmware.
Then T-Mobile was the first big carrier to offer free tethering - I switched to them from AT&T. And now more carriers are offering free tethering because it’s losing them customers probably.
I get 5gb of tethering included on T-Mobile with an “unlimited” plan. I already have an app that routes the traffic through my VPN so only used a few MB for when I forgot to turn on the forwarding.
What app is that? I have 10gb tethering on my phone and would love to do that
VPN Hotspot on Fdroid. Its overly complicated, has not been updated for 2 years, and requires root but it works for me.
Carrier only detects traffic if I run it wrong.
It is important for context to understand that this should only apply to unlimited data plans. Conceptually it is because there is limited spectrum available to consumers overall which limits bandwidth. Financially, they should not do this to anyone who is paying per gigabyte for their data plan. It’s your data that you paid for. That has not stopped them from trying. If it is unlimited, it simply stops abusers from running an entire household off of spectrum that everyone has to share.
As per usual, the truth is lost in the nuance.
Under my current plan I get unlimited data and 10GB free tethering.
Used to be a thing with O2 here in the UK. My iPhone 3G (so, 2009?) was affected so I had to install an app that allowed me to tether.
No it’s not just an American thing. On my carrier I can have unlimited data all I want but hotspot is limited to 5GB/month and I have to pay for more or it goes down to 512Kbps basically unusable.
Italian here, Vodafone did this thing to me and I switched to Illiad, never looking back
USA here, AT&T does not do this, tethering is included.
Sort of. The plans we’ve had from at&t for the last 5 years included only 15gb of hotspot usage along with unlimited mobile data.
Seems like a fair amount of hotspot data except we live in the sticks and mobile has been the only Internet option.
On the upside were weeks away from gig speed fiber being installed to the house.
I was about to say maybe look at the newer satellite tech, but that’s way better!
Satellite Internet is shit. Even the musk one of us actually any faster needs to fail simply because he would profit from it, and he deserves just nothing but depression.
Don’t assume that’s when it will be available. We had the fiber line dug in through our neighborhood back in March, but they’re still laying it in other areas nearby, and apparently they are waiting to turn it on until they’re done with all of it, which is supposed to be done sometime this fall, according to the original plan announced before they started any of it, sometime last year. If there’s been any delays since then I guess I’m stuck waiting longer.
And since I’m stuck at home due to a major medical issue (hopefully should only be a problem for another year or so), once it does become available I will still have to convince my parents that ditching our cable connection and using online streaming to get all their channels and ad free streaming of anything not currently broadcasting along with Internet that’s literally 40x faster than what we have here now while AT THE SAME TIME saving like $80-$90 per month is worth it. Mom in particular is so hesitant to have to learn anything different that I think she’d rather still pay the higher amount just because she’s used to it.
“Included”.
Imagine getting a steam deck and you’re out and about and you use your hotspot so you can play a game. Your game needs to be updated. Now imagine you have the $35 plan. You won’t even make it to playing your game before you get throttled to 128KB/s.
Hotspots are the new thing they’ve modeled the plans around. First it was minutes, then it was texting, then it was data, now it’s hotspots.
edit: I’ve been arguing about this with them for ages because we WERE on a grandfathered plan from when they bought out cingular. They got rid of our plan (Kicked us off said plan.) and these are the only 3 options they have left.
edit2: Forgot to mention. The rationale they give for this is that they “don’t want people using their cellular data to replace their home internet”.
I’m in the US. I remember being told it was a thing on Verizon. But I’ve used my mobile hotspot many times and never had an issue.
Us vzw customers are almost all on some version of an “unlimited” package now, which includes hotspotting. If you had one of the lower valued plans, hotspotting can still be expensive. Hitspotting can still push you over your “unlimited” data allowance however, at which point your traffic gets deprioritized aka slow af.
Same.
Definitely a USA thing since Comcast were mentioned.
Here in New Zealand I have a friend who uses his Mobile hotspot to connect his Xbox to it to play games online at no extra cost from the mobile provider.
A few mobile plans offered by Telcos here in New Zealand used to have this as well, not sure if they still do
I remember it definitely being a very common thing in USA a decade or so ago. I never knew it disappeared. I don’t think it would ever fly in Europe.
I don’t think it would ever fly in Europe.
It does, or at least did. I’m in the UK, and it used to be fairly common. Over the last few years, maybe the last decade, more and more providers used the lack of tethering restrictions as an advertised feature to show that they were better than the competition.
Now that we’ve left the EU though, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the restrictions come back. We’ve already lost free EU roaming on a lot of tariffs.
The fact that as soon as the UK left the EU carriers removed the free roaming shows the importance of government regulations
It’s not only important. This example and many others like usb-c/pd, removable batteries shows it’s working.
Maybe on carrier bought phones where they removed the feature. If you bought an unlocked Nexus or Pixel and a SIM only plan you could always tether as much as you wanted on any UK plan.
It was nothing to do with the phone. I tried to find one for my father to use for his computer, as he only used the internet now and then, but the SIM only plans had data restrictions on tethering.
They started off as unlimited pay as you go with prices charged by the megabyte then gigabyte, then once high data plans came in, they started to get restricted.
As I said, it’s been changing, but as far as I know, there are still plans with tethering restrictions.
I don’t see how they could know.
There used to be jailbreak tweaks in the iOS 4 days that would allow you to use it regardless of your carrier.
I remember it as well. That’s when I started buying unlocked phones and rooting them to get around having to pay. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out there wasn’t a fee anymore. I really hope that having to pay for hotspot isn’t coming back.
deleted by creator
That is outrageous. US telecom companies need to be nationalized or burned down.
Removed by mod
Singapore?
Death penalty for lack of hotspot? Really?
deleted by creator
I’ve heard about this happening and I couldn’t believe it.
I don’t even understand this from a networking perspective… Your phone just becomes a router, forwarding requests, so from the ISP perspective it’s still the same?
How do they even know?
They worked with OS developers, certainly. My phone says it’s “verifying” for a sec before it fails.
They detect lower than usual TTL of packets coming from your mobile device when it routes packets during tethering. They might also set TTL to 1 to packets going from internet to your mobile, so they get dropped instead of being forwarded further. You would need to plug the SIM card into your own modem+router combo with TTL modification rules in place to avoid detection. But then they might just block your modem by checking IMEI…
Or we could
cut their cocks offhave a very nice chat with them about the ethics of taking advantage of consumers.Is that actually it? So could software be written to just +1 TTL on incoming and -1 on outgoing packets and then problem solved?
You would need pretty low level access so that comes around to custom rom again…
You can spoof MACs so couldn’t you spoof a IMEI as well? Theoretically speaking, not on your bog standard $2 ISP modem
Yes, I don’t know all the solutions but one would be using iptables in linux and mangling the packets to adjust ttl, “normal” ttl can vary by carrier though, and with many phones there is an extra hop to account for as the phone is a router. You should be able to tell from a ping or trace route whats “normal”, but nowadays with carrier grade nat, I think it gets messed up sometimes.
You can spoof inei information, but it appears difficult r/privacy thread on the topic.
That is a very old thread, I bet things are different than they were 8 years ago
That’s some bullshit right there. Can you get around this with a custom rom?
“Yes but actually no.” If they can get a custom ROM flashed, yes. But it’s very likely everything is just locked down, so it’s not an option.
EDIT: According to the other comments even that might not help. YMMV
Back in college, we would use a hotspot on someone’s phone (with mobile data off) as a WiFi router to play LAN games.
I just checked my Pixel 6a and it doesn’t let me do that.
Thank you, smooth-brained developers at Google. I love not being able to do what I want with my purchased device.
That’s not Google pushing that message. That’s your mobile service provider.
It’s Google.
I think there’s a misunderstanding. I was trying to convey in my previous comment that Google does not allow me to create a hotspot with my mobile data turned off.
I put my SIM in my backup phone, a OnePlus Nord N10, to prove it to you. I can create a hotspot with my mobile data turned off on it.
I can’t do so on my Pixel 6a.
Hotspot began as a paid feature. It only became free as carriers lost grip on the devices on their network.
This is one reason why I will never pay for a phone I cannot root if a rootable option exists.
Strangers on the internet constantly tell me I am a fool to root “'cause security”, and I just shake my head.
If I pay $700 for a phone, I own it. If I’m paying for X gigabytes of cellular data, I will not be told I cannot use it “for that”.
I almost never see advertisements, am blocking tracking and malware at the device level, and impriving sound output quality. I use kernels that are patched up way better than the device default, and have superior battery life, and cpy over-clocking.
I’d go insane if I had to deal with all those restrictions, invasion of privacy, and monetization of my life at my expense.
The options grow thinner every year. Not too many high spec devices can be rooted at all these days.
There are options now that allow you to remove phone bloat/ads/spyware without rooting and without breaking the security model of the device. GrapheneOS and CalyxOS have made rooting obsolete IMO.
You don’t have to root to use graphene? I always thought you did and that was basically the only reason I haven’t switched. Thanks!
You just need an OEM unlocked Pixel and a web browser that supports webUSB. You literally just click the buttons on the installation web page and it does everything for you in your web browser.
https://grapheneos.org/install/web
You can even install GrapheneOS using another phone, no desktop computer needed.
Rooting and custom rom get interchanged a bit. Rooting just means gaining access to root, graphene os is a custom rom and you don’t necessarily have access to root. Personally i’ve been running custom roms for years with no root but it’s my property and damn sure better be able to root it if I want to. Anyway, with either root or custom rom you can probably get around your carrier’s tethering restrictions which is what OP meant.
Out of interest, are there good resources on archiving those optimisations when rooting you would recommend? I’m low key interested in cracking android open when I’ll have to buy a new phone eventually but haven’t yet looked into the topic.
yeah but for privacy like running grapheneos, rooting might not be a good idea. I absolutely agree that the option needs to be there though.
deleted by creator
Just downloaded it and I’m already sharing my connection with my tablet. Beautiful! Thank you so much for the link!
Does this one handle https connectivity properly? I know that EasyTether failed in this without paying, and I couldn’t get it to work for anything…
Awesome! I’ll be sure to give it a shot when I have the chance.
This is a game changer for me! Thank you
Because the Republican party wants it this way. They’ve burned down net neutrality at every possible opportunity because it doesn’t affect them; they barely understand how to send an email, much less connect a device to Wi-Fi without calling their offspring to do it for them.
They say it doesn’t affect them, but then they cry censorship when their chud-services are slow and treated like D-Grade refuse by their ISP.
It was annoying hearing all the conservatives arguing against net neutrality with such timeless classics as “Government Regulation only makes things worse” as an excuse to get rid of the regulation that helped protect them.
Other greatest hits include defanging the CFPB then getting mad when the private company BBB can’t do anything about their shady pool cleaning service charging them for services that were skipped.
it happened in Italy too, it stayed up less than a year than thay made it illegal
Here are a few examples that could support the claim that Republicans have opposed net neutrality regulations:
- In 2017, the Republican-controlled FCC under chairman Ajit Pai repealed the net neutrality rules that had been put in place during the Obama administration. This allowed ISPs more freedom to throttle or prioritize certain content and services.
- Congressional Republicans have generally opposed legislation to restore net neutrality rules. In 2018, the Senate passed a bill to reinstate the rules, but it did not advance in the Republican-controlled House.
- Major broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon have historically donated more to Republican politicians than Democrats. Republicans have received criticisms that these donations sway their positions against net neutrality rules.
Here are some sources that could counter or provide an alternative perspective to the claim that Republicans uniformly oppose net neutrality:
- The conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks supported the 2017 FCC net neutrality repeal under Ajit Pai. However, they opposed a bill in 2012 that they argued would have given the government too much control over the internet. This illustrates more nuanced positions.
- Former Senator John Thune (R-SD) proposed net neutrality legislation in 2015 that attempted to find a middle ground. It would have banned blocking and throttling but avoided heavier utility-style regulations advocated by Democrats. This demonstrated a more moderate Republican approach.
- Polls indicate Republican voters are nearly as supportive of net neutrality protections as Democrats and independents. A 2018 poll by the University of Maryland found 86% of Republicans opposed the FCC repeal. This suggests public opinion within the party is mixed.
As for your last point, you act like any of those dinosaurs know how to.
It started when unlimited plans first became a thing. Prior to that, you paid for a specific amount of data up to a cap, then paid a premium if you went over, so they didn’t care how you used it. When US companies first started offering unlimited plans, they excluded teathering, or added an extra charge for it, because you can use so much more data that way. Many companies have dropped that - I know my Verizon plan let’s me teather - but some still have it.
Yup, they tried to enforce that here in Denmark as well with the unlimited plans. Luckily, they lost the case to our Ombudsman and they were forced to allow hotspots
Just because most people don’t seem to know this: Comcast’s wifi service Xfinity is actually mostly fed by the routers Comcast cable customers have in their homes. So as a cable customer, you’re paying the electric bill and giving up part of your bandwidth to support Xfinity.
1: that’s why I always use my own modem and router
2: you can opt out of this (and I highly recommend everyone does that cares about their bandwidth), though it is shitty it’s on by default
3: only paying Comcast customers can take advantage of this. So if other people can use yours, it means you can use other people’s when you’re out and about as well.
If it’s implemented well, it’s honestly not a bad idea. Just need proper security and and QoS and that extra bandwidth you aren’t using anyways can be safely lent out to others within WiFi reach. On the other hand, I trust Comcast in implement such a feature well? Heck no!
The value is only for Comcast though. You’re a paying customer to provide a feature for them. There’s no discount to you as the customer, but they really try forcing people it use it and usually try to imply owning your own network equipment is somehow bad (because they can’t use your equipment for their business needs).
You can demand they turn that shit off, though. Granted you have to call them, but they stopped those shenanigans right quick when I told them to.
Those under the Optimum/Altice monopoly should know this as well. Their new modems will try to pull that nonsense too. I just requested an old style modem that doesn’t have the wifi capability and use my own router.
If optimum wants to sell their overpriced b.s Internet service they can set up their own wifi network without piggybacking off of the one I pay for tyvm…
How do they detect that you are using a hotspot? Isn’t the phone using NAT internally? Like, with NAT they don’t know whether a request comes from your phone or from the hotspot
The carrier can look at the packets TTL and assume if it’s not what they expect then it must have originated from another device via the hotspot. Verizon did, or maybe still does, use this to throttle hotspot traffic but not data originating from the phone.
This is correct. I pay for the unlimited plan with Verizon, but it only has 5GB of hotspot data. I use an
iptablesrule to increment the TTL by one, giving me unlimited data on my laptop.T-Mobile used to work the same way when I used it back in 2016.
iptables on your tethered machine or your android phone?
iptableson my laptop (not tethered, but using the phone’s wifi hotspot). I don’t even have a jailbroken android phone anymore because my banking app stopped working on custom ROMs and fighting with it wasn’t a good use of my time.
Very nice. Unfortunately in Windows so no iptables for me. Nice to know this is possible…may have to see if I can do this with vbox or inside WSL.
Doesn’t that violate net neutrality?
I’m curious about this as well.
Yup, I can stream 1080p videos all day long on my phone, use tb of data, no issue from AT&T, no throttling, no overcharge. Switch on my Hotspot and go above 20gb on my laptop? That’s a paddlin!
Fucking, greedy shitbags.
Long time ago, but it’s entirely dependent upon carrier.
Mint for example doesn’t have an extra fee for hotspot. Mine didn’t work after setting up service and I had to chat them, but they fixed it and it works fine. Cricket didn’t charge for it for a long time, until they did, and I no longer use them as a result.
You just need to find a carrier that includes it for no fee. At least you can vote with your wallet on those things. And when they ask why you are canceling and porting your number, be honest it’s because of their hotspot policy, and other carriers don’t charge for it.
I agree. Long ago, mobile Hotspot just came with my plans. Now it’s extra, which is stupid. Just another way for them to make $$
It’s insane that they get away with this because it’s digital. Imagine if you were doing some handiwork and your hammer was like, “Our policy has changed. If you wish to continue hammering nails >3in, please subscribe for $30/mo.”
Don’t have to imagine. Change your metaphor from hammer to car, and you’re experiencing it in realtime.
Slightly different topic, but I’m just waiting for the day when all the major music companies stop allowing their artists to appear on Tidal, Spotify, etc and instead launch their own exclusive apps and streaming services. So you’ll need a Warners subscription, and a Sony subscription and a Geffen subscription and an EMI subscription…
If it happened with TV and moves, it could happen with music too.
Thats insane, in Australia at least it’s still just a data plan - buying a cheap prepaid SIM or mobile plan for data is a common thing since our Internet infrastructure is shithouse. I hope no aspiring telco middle managers cotton on to this.
Visible service has unlimited hotspot/tethering, however its throttled.
For a while I used it as my main internet connection by tethering it via USB to a router that spoofed the TTL packets, which bypassed the throttling.
I can vouch for Visible. AT&T was too expensive. Mint (T-Mobile) didn’t have signal at my office. Red Pocket cut my service off for using too much unlimited data. Visible is cheap and unlimited. The signal is excellent too. I don’t need anything more.
