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Last year I called T-Mobile for some relatively minor reason and then got into a conversation about this "upgrade" I could get that would knock my bill down $20
by nkozyra 7y ago
Last year I called T-Mobile for some relatively minor reason and then got into a conversation about this "upgrade" I could get that would knock my bill down $20 a month, provide option X, Y and Z.
It sounded too good to be true so I just kept asking if I'd lose anything. I was assured, no, it's all benefit.
In the past if I had an internet outage at home I'd switch to to tethered phone and have no drop in speed. In fact, it was faster than work or home.
I recently moved and while waiting for internet installation suddenly found my tethered rate went down to .25/mpbs, whereas in the past it was up around 40mbps up and down. My phone itself reached these speeds via LTE. It became immediately apparent what I'd signed up for in my "upgrade" the year prior. I had been on some grandfathered plan that had no such restriction, and by "upgrading" sacrificed my ability to tether without moving to a One Plus plan.
Of course in the heat of all of this I asked myself that same question: "how does T-Mobile know?" Some of the suggestions here seem unlikely since I'm still able to get good speeds via the phone simultaneously while limited via computer. The MAC address thing seems compelling but I'm obviously not going to go around spoofing anything just because I got duped by my provider.
I've been a T-Mobile customer forever, but that kind of deception was really, really insulting.
- nneonneo 7y agoI was on T-Mobile until recently (moved to Canada, where we _finally_ have unlimited plans too), and I worked around the throttling by running a SOCKS5 proxy on my phone and tunneling through that while connected to the tether. The packets appear to originate from my phone (iPhone) rather than the tethered device, and I got uncapped speeds.
- lunchables 7y agoVery nice! What iOS app are you using? I didn't realize this kind of functionality would be allowed.
- nneonneo 7y agoI originally made my own app: compiled an OSS SOCKS proxy with a simple iOS wrapper, deployed with a free developer account. Later, I switched to using Pythonista (paid app available on the App Store) to run a SOCKS proxy written in Python. I should add - Pythonista is a pretty amazing app, given that it’s a proper App Store app that lets you write your own Python programs with full access to iOS APIs (including the ability to dlopen private frameworks via ctypes...). The iOS app I “wrote” is up on GitHub: https://github.com/nneonneo/socks5-ios https://github.com/nneonneo/socks5-ios. It’s really barebones; I knocked it together in less than an hour since I rather desperately wanted a good internet connection at the time :)
- adammenges 7y agoWhere’s the python code you’re running?
- nneonneo 7y agoI didn't upload it anywhere because it's _shamefully_ hacked up - it's a quick bodge-job on top of some existing Python SOCKS proxy, where I added PAC support so my iPad can also use the hotspot (since you need PAC to convince iOS to use a SOCKS proxy). But, hey, if you want to see some random person's SOCKS code bodged up with some extra hacky bits from me, here you go: https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/fc770965944a4640e2aef34e0f8eae0e https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/fc770965944a4640e2aef34e0f8... If you want to use PAC, set the "automatic proxy URL" to http://172.20.10.1/wpad.dat http://172.20.10.1/wpad.dat when using this as a tethering proxy (yes, iOS lets you bind port 80 without root - your app just needs to be running).
- baybal2 7y agoChange your APN in modem settings to be the same as one used for internet on the smartphone
- komali2 7y agoThat's super weird, T-Mobile is supposed to have simplified their plans to just the one like 65$ one with no restrictions. It's a big part of their pitch - "we're the no bullshit, no contract company," so I'm pretty disappointed to hear they're moving away from that.
- beecat 7y agoYeah no contract, but if you don't formally cancel your month-to-month service they will send you to collections for the next months bill.
- komali2 7y agoWait, like, formally cancel in what sense? I would expect if you wanted to cancel a service, you'd have to tell somebody about it?
- mikestew 7y agoI have to be missing something obvious, because without you letting them know, the only way I can figure for them to know not to bill you anymore is telepathy.
- Talanes 7y agoOther No Contract carriers bill up front so they can just stop service if you stop paying.
- deathanatos 7y agoThey were when I joined as a customer around ~2012. But in more recent years they make weird distinctions between tethered and non-tethered. My SO's phone has T-Mo's version of Android, and enabling tethering causes a visible phone-home interstitial. My phone is unlocked/has vanilla Android, so it doesn't. Our billing, IMO, is very not up-front about what our limits on tethered/not are. Generally, it hasn't mattered. Whatever our limits are, we're not hitting them. And it's annoying AF; there is no reason for a carrier to give a crap about tethered/not. Limit my bandwidth, cap the amount I can send, sure — I completely understand not wanting a customer dragging down the network —, but what does it matter what device generated the bits?
- somepig 7y agotmo is a combination of TTL and APN. Stock android and iOS will use the tethering APN under the hood. LineageOS doesn't. I'm presently tethered to a tmo phone on their cheapest unlimited data plan and see 20mbit+
- cmroanirgo 7y agoThe suggestion that monitoring TTL would seem a pretty easy way to distinguish between mobile and laptop. It seems you'd want to set your laptop's TTL to phone+1, and match the phone's TTL. Here's a random howto change ttl for Ubuntu and windows: https://askubuntu.com/questions/667096/how-to-change-the-default-ttl-of-tcp-ip-packets https://askubuntu.com/questions/667096/how-to-change-the-def... Btw, an interesting article on the effectiveness of TTL for fingerprinting: https://www.howtogeek.com/104337/hacker-geek-os-fingerprinting-with-ttl-and-tcp-window-sizes/ https://www.howtogeek.com/104337/hacker-geek-os-fingerprinti...
- lunchables 7y ago>I've been a T-Mobile customer forever, but that kind of deception was really, really insulting. Did you try calling T-Mobile? I would be curious if they could confirm it was in fact throttling tethered devices and if they could explain and maybe correct the behavior?
- mi100hael 7y agoYes, on the T-Mobile "One" plan they did throttle tethering traffic. You had to pay an extra $15/mo or so for the "One Plus" plan to get LTE tethering speeds. I believe they may have lifted this throttling on the new "Magenta" plans they rolled out a few months ago.
- nathanvanfleet 7y agoI am not sure when they treated you right to make you surprised.
- el_benhameen 7y agoThis very limitation kept me from upgrading my T-Mobile plan for years. I read about Mint on here the last time a plan-related discussion came up, and I switched to them because they don't throttle tethered traffic. They're a MVNO on tmo's network so you do risk getting deprioritized during congestion, but so far I've been pretty happy. (I hope this comment doesn't come off as shilling for Mint. I just happened to have the same problem as you and was fairly satisfied with this solution.)
- RandomBacon 7y agoI use StraightTalk. MVNOs are the way to go, whichever one anyone here chooses. They are prepaid, but you save a lot of money in the long run, and they usually have better data allowances.
- mung 7y agoWouldn't this be a breach of some consumer law? They told you one thing and you signed up on that basis. It's misleading.
- inlined 7y agoYes. And I signed up for AT&T DSL when their ad said “cancel anytime; no penalties”. When I cancelled, I received a cancellation bill and a letter saying “come back, remember we’re the company that doesn’t have cancellation fees” in the same day. I tried to dispute the bill and they sent it to collections. Also, during signup they ran a hard credit check explicitly against my permission. One person vs BigCo doesn’t always work out.
- lapnitnelav 7y agoReminds me of the crazy phone plans when mobile started getting popular in my country. There was one super premium, quite expensive of course, which was pretty much unlimited everything. It worked so well (for the heavy phone consumers) that the company tried its best to buy those contracts back / move those folks on a more profitable plan.