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Tmobile deprioritizes devices depending on high usage. Private Relay would allow individuals who are deprioritized to bring down entire cell towers.
by nojito 5y ago
Tmobile deprioritizes devices depending on high usage. Private Relay would allow individuals who are deprioritized to bring down entire cell towers.
- kstrauser 5y agoNo, it wouldn't. They'd still have the ability to throttle individual phones generating lots of traffic.
- Spooky23 5y agoCarriers nat/proxy everything and in addition to bandwidth throttling, they will rate limit or otherwise whack misbehaving applications. VPNing everything at scale will impact that monitoring/management. And that will absolutely impact towers, or cause the carriers to throttle users vs apps.
- cobookman 5y ago...they throttle at the phone-number/SIM. Even with a VPN your phone is still auth'ing itself to the cell towers, and those towers know what device is sending which traffic. What this prevents is allowing say Youtube to pay TMobile to never throttle their traffic.
- Spooky23 5y agoI know from firsthand experience that Verizon at least can and did do more circa 2016.
- acdha 5y agoVPNs work at a higher level. They have to see the radio traffic to be able to deliver packets to your phone, which is where billing and access control happens (this is why you can’t spoof someone else’s IP to avoid paying your bill), and at the IP level your VPN traffic is carried from your carrier-issued IP address to your VPN provider’s addresses. The one legitimate argument here is that this prevents traffic shaping based on the destination, which T-Mobile uses to do things like offer unlimited streaming separate from your general data quota.
- MikeBVaughn 5y agoCan you give a detailed model of how this would bring down a tower? I'm very skeptical.
- kjs3 5y agoYou should be. There are ways to DoS a cell site, but not by just using a device.
- deadbunny 5y agoCurrently: P ---- CT ---- S With VPN/whatever: P ---- CT ---- VE ---- S P = Phone CT = Cell Tower S = Server VE = VPN endpoint So given this the cell tower can still determine who is using lots of traffic, they just can snoop on that traffic.
- dpratt 5y agoYou're a little off, currently: P --- CT --- NAT Proxy/Traffic Shaper --- Possible MITM host --- S