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.
USA here, AT&T does not do this, tethering is included.
“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”.
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
My carrier has been giving me weekly data packs since mid May, with a use-or-lose-it condition, so I have been actively not using my home connection and connecting everything I can remember to my phone’s hotspot.
The moment you pay/receive the bandwith, it’s yours to use as you understand; the network can’t interfere with its usage.
That is gross overreach.
Italian here, Vodafone did this thing to me and I switched to Illiad, never looking back
IIRC they outlawed it and Vodafone’s hotspot is now free as well.
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 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.
There used to be jailbreak tweaks in the iOS 4 days that would allow you to use it regardless of your carrier.
Hotspot began as a paid feature. It only became free as carriers lost grip on the devices on their network.
Depends which country you’re talking about
You’re probably right. This was the case in the US and Canada.
Awesome! I’ll be sure to give it a shot when I have the chance.
This is a game changer for me! Thank you
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…
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Just downloaded it and I’m already sharing my connection with my tablet. Beautiful! Thank you so much for the link!
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.
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.
Certified USA moment
Certified cringe internet moment
I don’t think that’s a thing in Europe.
Not a thing in the US either. Not sure what dogshit carrier OP is using that is fucking them.
With T-Mobile in the States, usually you’re not paying extra, but you are capped on hotspot data, even if you have an unlimited data plan. Which is still kind of BS
Not one mention in this thread of Net Neutrality. How quick we are to forget.
Because this isn’t a net neutrality issue?
Where are you?
In Canada I’ve never heard this being charged for
This is a thing that I think only happens in the US.
I moved to Brazil from the US and my wife found it super weird that I asked her how much would they charged me after she asked me to activate my hotspot.
USA
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.
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.
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.
There are options now that allow you to remove phone bloat/ads/spyware without rooting and without breaking the security model of the devive. 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.
In America, some carriers disable hotspot on the devices they sell and hold you hostage. There are many ways around this. The best way is to use OEM non carrier phones. Other options include pdanet and several other apps designed to bypass the carrier software locks. My graphene os hotspot works perfectly no matter what carrier I use
Edit: Oh, and you can forget it on iphones. Apple loves sucking carriers dicks and fucking you all over. They go out of their way to ensure the carriers are robbing you before allowing hotspot use
I have an iPhone through T-mobile and I don’t have to pay extra for my hotspot. Kinda hilarious, though, I only get 20 gigglebytes of high speed hotspot, which my 5g can blow through in as little as 3 minutes 45 seconds as of the latest speed test (712mbps). After that, it caps it at 600kbps. They have no problem with me using hundreds of gigglebytes directly on the phone, for some reason, I don’t see why they have to limit hotspot.
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.
I haven’t renewed my student unlimited data plan since 2011. It lasted through a company merger and a pandemic. I’m never renewing my plan. My first born will inherit this plan when I die.
Which carrier is this?
Laughs in European
I’ve never had to pay extra for hotspot usage even though all of the phones I’ve had were bought directly from the service provider.
LycaMobile blocks both hotspots and VPNs in Europe. I made the mistake of buying a SIM from them once.
The US cellular providers are super greedy
The moment they deliver it and it is paid for, you can do whatever you want.
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.
