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> forcing the carrier to make good on their promise of "unlimited data" I'm on the fence about what I think about the announcement itself (because of the impli

> forcing the carrier to make good on their promise of "unlimited data" I'm on the fence about what I think about the announcement itself (because of the implications around enforcement), but this is a pretty untenable argument if you want to get into "promises", or, who's really breaking their contract. Contractually, the promise is unlimited data without tethering. Explicitly. If we want to talk about who's breaking what promises by rooting phones to bypass tethering data limits, it's actually the "omg hackers".

StavrosK 11y ago
How do they know it's people tethering? How do they know it's not someone just doing all their downloading on the phone and then transferring it to the computer or whatnot? The only clue they have that these people were tethering was that they used 2 TB, but they may just as well have been watching a lot of Netflix on their tablet.
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- cwyers 11y ago
  Netflix on tablets pulls down different data than Netflix on a laptop; if you look at the actual traffic you can probably figure it out pretty quickly.
- jsnell 11y ago
  > The only clue they have that these people were tethering was that they used 2 TB That's not true, and it's kind of uncharitable of you to assign malice and technical incompetence to T-Mobile. There can be all kinds of differences in the tethered traffic patterns vs. native phone traffic. For example: - Differences in IP TTL of packets - Differences in TCP options, advertised windows, and so on - Differences in packet ordering / RTTs (if you've got interleaved TCP flows one which is terminated at the phone and one which isn't, you'd see the terminated packets being acknowledged sooner) - Differences in the application layer data (for example the user agent field) The people who are camouflaging their tethering would of course try to apply countermeasures against as many things as possible. But if they miss one kind of fingerprint, it could be used to detect the tethering. That'd be the case if it's a signal that'd be hard to deal with by a realtime automated system, but requires some kind of expensive offline analysis.
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StavrosK 11y ago

How do they know it's people tethering? How do they know it's not someone just doing all their downloading on the phone and then transferring it to the computer or whatnot? The only clue they have that these people were tethering was that they used 2 TB, but they may just as well have been watching a lot of Netflix on their tablet.

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cwyers 11y ago
Netflix on tablets pulls down different data than Netflix on a laptop; if you look at the actual traffic you can probably figure it out pretty quickly.
jsnell 11y ago
> The only clue they have that these people were tethering was that they used 2 TB That's not true, and it's kind of uncharitable of you to assign malice and technical incompetence to T-Mobile. There can be all kinds of differences in the tethered traffic patterns vs. native phone traffic. For example: - Differences in IP TTL of packets - Differences in TCP options, advertised windows, and so on - Differences in packet ordering / RTTs (if you've got interleaved TCP flows one which is terminated at the phone and one which isn't, you'd see the terminated packets being acknowledged sooner) - Differences in the application layer data (for example the user agent field) The people who are camouflaging their tethering would of course try to apply countermeasures against as many things as possible. But if they miss one kind of fingerprint, it could be used to detect the tethering. That'd be the case if it's a signal that'd be hard to deal with by a realtime automated system, but requires some kind of expensive offline analysis.
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