7 ms·

Smartphone Tethering: A Bigger Grind Than It Needed to Be

91 points by shortformblog 2y ago

notjulianjaynes 2y ago
Like 5 years ago I paid $10 for an app called easytether. Drivers for Windows, Mac, Linux you install these and app on your phone. It tunnels all computer traffic through your phone's browser so no tethering fees or data caps if you have unlimited phone data. Very simple and when I lived in a rural area it was the choice between that and the hilariously slow/overpriced satalite internet (this was pre starlink).
- LorenDB 2y ago
  Or you could have done the same for free by setting the packet TTL on all client devices to 65. Carriers check if a device is using hotspot by looking at packet TTLs. Anything coming from your phone directly has a TTL of 64, but anything connected via hotspot loses one TTL hopping through your phone, so it comes through as 63 (or 127 for Windows devices). Overriding your client TTL to 65 means that carriers will receive the packet with a TTL of 64.
  - jasonjayr 2y ago
    It can't be that simple? Doesn't the phone switch APN's when tethering is active? Or bridge the hotspot to a different APN?
    - LorenDB 2y ago
      It is that simple. I have successfully used this to continue using hotspot after exceeding my monthly allowance as recently as a few months ago.
  - notjulianjaynes 2y ago
    Yeah that's probably how it works, except I don't know how to actually implement all of that myself, and it was a one time payment for use on all my devices. The only downside is connection is through usb or bluetooth. If you are aware of a way to put my un-rootable phone in hotspot mode that sidesteps the up-charge, please advise. When I had a pixel with Graphene installed this was possible.
- seltzered_ 2y ago
  IIRC there were even some hacky tethering services that leveraged unlimited text messaging plans with a smartphone to some special server to facilitate internet.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    I remember Palm OS being able to send and receive binary attachments via SMS (over Infrared or Bluetooth and an attached phone, I think). Not MMS, actually data SMS! As far as I remember, a full screen JPEG (320x320 pixel) would have been thousands of messages according to the UI. Having a phone plan where each text was dozens of cents, that UI scared me a lot.
- reginald78 2y ago
  Those pre-starlink satellite internet setups were horrible. I remember using a bandwidth calculator to determine I could download about the same per month off my 56K modem as the monthly data cap. Sure, it sucked for burst downloads but the 56K was way cheaper and had much better latency as well (Hughesnet type setups had multiple second latency). It wasn't a great experience playing online games on 56K but with Hughesnet it was actually impossible. I ultimately determined that if I wanted to spend more money for better internet then shotgunned 56K was the next step up, not satellite.
- nosioptar 2y ago
  I got (unauthorized) tethering to work on a few phones. Easytether was infinitely easier and worth every penny. I love that they sell it straight off their website rather than making people buy via the play store. (I paid for it on three phones. Had it been play store only, I would have pirated it each time.)
LorenDB 2y ago
I am infuriated that practically every (US) carrier claims an unlimited data plan, but then proceeds to limit your hotspot usage. It's just data. Let me use it. Yes, I know about (and sometimes use) the ttl=65 loophole, but I'd like to see a major carrier launch a truly unlimited plan.
- jonpurdy 2y ago
  Since you mentioned it, on MacOS when tethering: sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=65 When done, switch it back: sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=64 I went from 0.3Mbps on T-Mobile to 50+ Mbps with this; on providers that limit hotspot speed by examining TTL, this can be an effective way to get around it. (They assume if they see TTL as one lower than expected, data is passing through a hotspot/phone instead of directly from the phone.)
  - LorenDB 2y ago
    Linux uses a similar command: sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_default_ttl=65 I assume there is an ipv6 version as well, but I haven't needed it.
    - betaby 2y ago
      net.ipv6.conf.all.hop_limit=65 + net.ipv6.conf.lo.hop_limit=65
  - betaby 2y ago
    There is no harm in keeping it at 65 permanently. Unless you think that TTL somehow helps to more uniquely identify you.
    - jonpurdy 2y ago
      Good to know! I'm not a networking expert so figured leaving the default made sense just in case.
  - ghotli 2y ago
seltzered_ 2y ago
In 2009-2010, it was rather eye-opening in the US to have an iPhone 3g/3gs both jailbroken (to run a tethering app like PDAnet) and unlocked (to use a cheaper GSM provider like T-Mobile instead of AT&T) which required all sorts of particulars like making sure the modem firmware didn't get updated. The article doesn't quite mention it but back then the other option to get internet on a laptop was a dedicated USB dongle modem or Wifi hub thing. Probably the next 'oh that's neat' moment happened a decade later when usb-c tethering became enabled such that one could tether a whole ethernet network of things to a phone if needed on occasion (e.g. broadband outages, moving to a new home)
- CalRobert 2y ago
  There were other options! I had a Palm Centro and ran PDANet on it - it was the only way I got internet in my house in a canyon in the country. https://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/06/09/pdanet-for-palm-os/ https://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/06/09/pdanet-for-palm-os/
- bluGill 2y ago
  I remember back then connecting by laptop to my cell phone via bluetooth. It was something like dialup, and only 2g speeds, but it worked on the road. I bought the first android phone a couple months latter and then I was able to tether via wifi, but still only 2g speeds. (IIRC 3g came latter) Now get off my lawn you young whippersnappers.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    The 2G stuff worked almost everywhere in the US there was cell service, and when 3G came out it was only good in the big cities for a number of years. Before USB, things that made a smartphone smart were its ability to get your laptop (or desktop) on the internet, anywhere that you had cell service. No differently than from a land line (except the land line did not charge by the minute unless it was long-distance). This is when you were paying for cellular voice service by the minute, with a certain number of free minutes included each month by this time. Dial-up ISP was on similar terms from a different provider like AOL, "always on" broadband was not very familiar yet and people were still accustomed to internet "sessions" where you log off as soon as you are finished. With cellphones and ISPs most people were still acting like every session should be limited or it could end up running their minutes over, and for the relatively few who wanted portable internet it had always been double minutes (well from two providers) in cost so the airwaves were not filled with any significant data minutes compared to voice. If it could wait people would do it on a land line, even long conversations. Oh, yeah, the cellphone itself was "on the internet" but about all it would do is email. Without a camera, color screen or very much of a keyboard the idea was to connect to a laptop if you needed portable internet. Which is why the phones eventually had a free software suite from the manufacturer which included the PC drivers for its cellular modem so you could dial-up to places like AOL. It was a virtual COM port which the PC could address like it was internal hardware, dial out to any ISP you had an account with, and the modem naturally communicated with the answering party over regular phone lines like it was supposed to do. Once AT&T itself started offering broadband, they also had toll-free phone numbers posted for account holders to use when they were not at their home router. You could dial up from any land line or smartphone. There was also a driver for the phone's virtual ethernet adapter if you wanted to use that, your phone would have an IP address. This is not the phone connecting by wifi, that came later. It was the PC software that made smartphones smart, along with removable storage, and USB networking when it came along. The early Motorola and Sony-Ericsson phones had infrared COM ports, to communicate with the early business laptops which had physical IR COM ports. Laptops were not yet affordable for very many students at all. IOW using Windows 98 over IR all you needed was the same built-in Windows apps to dial-up and log in to your ISP of choice, or alternatively autodial a fax machine and use Windows Faxing to send or receive a document straight from a file, with no paper involved at your end. Office 97 was not even necessary. Remember faxing was well established way before the internet got popular. The virtual COM ports over USB or Bluetooth came later but served the same purpose. After IR ports were long gone, the most common approach was using the USB cable but nobody called it "tethering" (that would have to wait until a different paradigm could be adopted and it could be billed for in an ongoing way). The USB cables were proprietary at one end and did cost about $30 extra so it was definitely not as popular as it could have been. Sure enough, one day somebody decided they would get more cellphone customers if they had "unlimited minutes". And also, cellular carriers gradually became ISPs themselves. But that basically meant that smartphone customers could have "always on" internet for the first time in history, even though it was not widely recognized. Over about a year period the carriers disavowed all knowledge of specialized USB communication cables. This was still before the iPhone but I could tell things were going downhill, and wanted to get some spare Sony cables before my phone was discontinued and replaced by a less capable but more expensive unit. In the retail stores you could tell they were operating from a script when they said they had never had factory USB cords, and it was the same stores where they had been in stock in earlier years. They did usher in a new generation of phones, a few of which would eventually communicate over generic USB cords. If you had a data plan, which would be charged extra, and there was no more factory cellphone software. The carrier handled it all, that's when they started calling it "tethering", always meaning that there's "supposed to be" an upcharge, and acting like it's a new feature with never-before-seen convenience. Fortunately the gigabytes have gotten liberal and it has gotten pretty convenient to enable tethering on Android, then connect any PC by USB or Bluetooth and be online. As the article says, "it was pretty messy for a while there, and it had nothing to do with the devices. It was basically the providers getting in the way."
arittr 2y ago
> I type in binary at about 30 words per minute I’ll just go quit my day job now
- MisterTea 2y ago
  Assuming 16 bit words that's just 60 bytes per minute.
bluedino 2y ago
For some reason I've always romanticized using a laptop + hotspot. This year due to various circumstances, I was going to start using it 24/7. I did not, however, because: T-Mobile seems to have an actual, usable and affordable plan. $50/month, but they don't offer it in my area. Verizon offers 5G home internet and it's only $35/month (I'm already a verizon wireless customer). It's available in my area, but there aren't any slots actually open for it. Their traditional 'Jetpack' options are $100/150GB of data. And using your phone as a hotspot only gives you 60GB of premium data and then you're rate limitied. ATT offers Internet Air, but they don't have any information on usage other than "In rare cases, if your usage is contributing to congestion on the network, AT&T will greatly reduce your speed for a min. of 30 min". Previously, their product wasn't offered at my address, and they also had disclaimers about not using it for media consumption or commercial use. They also allow 60GB of smartphone tethering and then throttled to 128kbs.
- spogbiper 2y ago
  Google Fi offers unlimited tethering for $65/month. Not sure of all the details
  - password4321 2y ago
    https://support.google.com/fi/answer/9462101?hl=en https://support.google.com/fi/answer/9462101?hl=en > Unlimited Plus plans allow up to 50 GB of full-speed data. > any data used after you reach your data limit is throttled or slowed to 256 kbps
    - doubled112 2y ago
      That's not unlimited at all.
      - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
        Not a single "unlimited" plan has ever been unlimited. I think they should be required to advertise a demonstrably achievable figure instead, such as 10 TiB/month. Or better yet, a sustainable MiB/second that won't get capped down to nothing.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
My non-branded customer-provided Samsung S22 recently started being unwilling to turn on hotspotting, respecting some flag for my carrier. You can still workaround by creating a Routine to turn it on, it it was infuriating to run into. Makes me want to go back to running custom roms, but Android SafetyNet keeps making that less and less feasible. I'm switching carriers, since it seems like writing is on the wall for this important capability for me.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  Pixel is mid hardware, but wins because GrapheneOS. Loudly ditch any app which locks you out for some new SafetyNet reasons (Graphene does attested boot and locks boot loader).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
swozey 2y ago
Ever since 5GUW.. maybe even just 5G, I haven't connected to a single wifi connection out working remotely than my phone. It's faster than nearly all of the bar/coffee/cowork wifis nowadays. I have 2GB (for an insane $145ish/mo) CenturyLink fiber and it's been horrible for the last 3-4 months. With that said, in my city subreddit we have a thread about how there are certain intersections/blocks that will kill your Apple Carplay while driving until you've exited the area. Th e running theory is there's a big telecom company or a defense contractor right there doing something weird.
- betaby 2y ago
  > I have 2GB (for an insane $145ish/mo) CenturyLink fiber and it's been horrible for the last 3-4 months. Why though? Are talking about bad Wi-Fi experience or you are not getting good speed even while connected through Ethernet. My friends with CenturyLinks have no complains.
  - swozey 2y ago
    CenturyLink is absolute trash. I live in a city full of people with CenturyLink and we all hate it. I also have coworkers with CL and they have been complaining about speeds. There's an entire thread on my cities subreddit about its poor performance as of late (for me about 6+ mo). I've never used CL anywhere but Denver, it's been the BY FAR most expensive and least reliable service I've had and something over the last 6ish months for me has made it awful. I didn't have many complaints aside from price until this year. https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/1fbjx1y/centurylink_fiber_intermittent_p https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/1fbjx1y/centurylink... ing_issues/ I'm not referring to wifi at all. This is my fiber connection. I have a million devices, half of which aren't wifi. I can barely run 2-3 youtube videos at 1080p - 4k each at a time right now. If my bedroom TV is playing a 1080p my desktop on ethernet may (not always) drop to auto-360p, etc. I used to never have to think about changing my youtube video quality up higher and off auto until this year IIRC. I'm constantly changing youtube quality now or have TVs that will buffer forever if a video is playing elsewhere. On my 2GB.. The positive of CL is their Outage detector is very accurate, I guess they probably get a lot of practice.
Dwedit 2y ago
I just use TetherFi (from Pyamsoft). Works great, except for wss sockets that do not support connections through proxies. Only hairy part is configuring proxy servers on Windows. For some stupid reason, a proxy configuration script must be served from a website and not a local file. So you need to install a localhost webserver just to serve the proxy configuration script.
Thoreandan 2y ago
Carriers send tethered traffic out different networks than they do for traffic from the mobile device. Fun side effects: Apps on your phone which, when you're on wi-fi, can connect to other apps on the same wi-fi, can't. Terrible performance getting to streaming services, when apps running on the device itself talk to them fine.
- killingtime74 2y ago
  This is not universally true. Which network and country are you in?
somat 2y ago
Wearing my network engineer hat. I was furious when I found out tethering in android was an option that could only be set by the network provider. Why should they get any say if I want to use my phone as a router. So just on principle alone I refuse to pay the tethering tax and tether using terminux and ssh. the usability sucks in comparison to the built in method but at least I get to control my packets.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I never saw that, then again we usually mostly buy Android phones pre-paid, free of any operator shenanigans.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    It doesn't matter how your got your phone. Most Android phones will respect the result of the tethering entitlement check, which is returned by your carrier.
    - adamomada 2y ago
      I did some digging around in an old jailbroken iPhone (iOS 12) to try to figure out how to stop broadcast alerts from the cell towers and there is a database on the device itself with various parameters from cell carriers around the world. So there are least some settings that are “hard-coded” in each OS release which don’t have to be sent from the carrier - the iPhone will do X based on the SIM in the phone or the network it’s roaming on. Not sure if tethering is one of the parameters , but there were quite a few.
      - Nextgrid 2y ago
        Yes tethering is absolutely one of the parameters - including whether it’s enabled at all and whether it goes over its own separate APN (which is how the carrier can limit it or throttle it separately from the main data plan) or is sent in-band over the main APN used by the system (alongside other params like the number of client devices connected to the hotspot if I remember correctly). Android has a similar “carrier settings” database, although I haven’t looked too deep into what kind of settings are available.
kylehotchkiss 2y ago
Here I am waiting for Apple to put a 5g chip in MacBooks. My 5G iPad is one of my favorite tech purchases ever. Always online feels so close. Even the iPhone/Macbook tethering thing feels so sloppy and fragile. Half the time I don't see my phone in the network list. I don't want to have to think about it.
aidenn0 2y ago
I may still have the RS-232 adapter for my ~2004ish flip phone; it presented a Hayes Modem (AT commands) interface for data.
renewiltord 2y ago
I just use Google Fi and don't think about any of this stuff. International or local. Tethering or not. And it's been this way for the better part of a decade. This is like hearing someone talk about how it's hard to record a show on VHS.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Google Fi also has tethering caps depending on which plan you're on.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Yeah, I just get the unlimited plan. I've had this for ages. When I've wanted to tether, I've tethered. Two button presses.
microflash 2y ago
Wow, reading all these comments makes me realise how different it is for other corners of the world compared to US. I have been working remotely with laptop + hotspot for ages. Locking such basic capability seems such a moneygrab.
rcbdev 2y ago
Another one of many things where EU citizens are blessed with more freedom than Americans. Who knew?

91 points by shortformblog 2y ago

Like 5 years ago I paid $10 for an app called easytether. Drivers for Windows, Mac, Linux you install these and app on your phone. It tunnels all computer traffic through your phone's browser so no tethering fees or data caps if you have unlimited phone data. Very simple and when I lived in a rural area it was the choice between that and the hilariously slow/overpriced satalite internet (this was pre starlink).

LorenDB 2y ago
Or you could have done the same for free by setting the packet TTL on all client devices to 65. Carriers check if a device is using hotspot by looking at packet TTLs. Anything coming from your phone directly has a TTL of 64, but anything connected via hotspot loses one TTL hopping through your phone, so it comes through as 63 (or 127 for Windows devices). Overriding your client TTL to 65 means that carriers will receive the packet with a TTL of 64.
- jasonjayr 2y ago
  It can't be that simple? Doesn't the phone switch APN's when tethering is active? Or bridge the hotspot to a different APN?
  - LorenDB 2y ago
    It is that simple. I have successfully used this to continue using hotspot after exceeding my monthly allowance as recently as a few months ago.
- notjulianjaynes 2y ago
  Yeah that's probably how it works, except I don't know how to actually implement all of that myself, and it was a one time payment for use on all my devices. The only downside is connection is through usb or bluetooth. If you are aware of a way to put my un-rootable phone in hotspot mode that sidesteps the up-charge, please advise. When I had a pixel with Graphene installed this was possible.
seltzered_ 2y ago
IIRC there were even some hacky tethering services that leveraged unlimited text messaging plans with a smartphone to some special server to facilitate internet.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I remember Palm OS being able to send and receive binary attachments via SMS (over Infrared or Bluetooth and an attached phone, I think). Not MMS, actually data SMS! As far as I remember, a full screen JPEG (320x320 pixel) would have been thousands of messages according to the UI. Having a phone plan where each text was dozens of cents, that UI scared me a lot.
reginald78 2y ago
Those pre-starlink satellite internet setups were horrible. I remember using a bandwidth calculator to determine I could download about the same per month off my 56K modem as the monthly data cap. Sure, it sucked for burst downloads but the 56K was way cheaper and had much better latency as well (Hughesnet type setups had multiple second latency). It wasn't a great experience playing online games on 56K but with Hughesnet it was actually impossible. I ultimately determined that if I wanted to spend more money for better internet then shotgunned 56K was the next step up, not satellite.
nosioptar 2y ago
I got (unauthorized) tethering to work on a few phones. Easytether was infinitely easier and worth every penny. I love that they sell it straight off their website rather than making people buy via the play store. (I paid for it on three phones. Had it been play store only, I would have pirated it each time.)

LorenDB 2y ago

I am infuriated that practically every (US) carrier claims an unlimited data plan, but then proceeds to limit your hotspot usage. It's just data. Let me use it. Yes, I know about (and sometimes use) the ttl=65 loophole, but I'd like to see a major carrier launch a truly unlimited plan.

jonpurdy 2y ago
Since you mentioned it, on MacOS when tethering: sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=65 When done, switch it back: sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=64 I went from 0.3Mbps on T-Mobile to 50+ Mbps with this; on providers that limit hotspot speed by examining TTL, this can be an effective way to get around it. (They assume if they see TTL as one lower than expected, data is passing through a hotspot/phone instead of directly from the phone.)
- LorenDB 2y ago
  Linux uses a similar command: sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_default_ttl=65 I assume there is an ipv6 version as well, but I haven't needed it.
  - betaby 2y ago
    net.ipv6.conf.all.hop_limit=65 + net.ipv6.conf.lo.hop_limit=65
- betaby 2y ago
  There is no harm in keeping it at 65 permanently. Unless you think that TTL somehow helps to more uniquely identify you.
  - jonpurdy 2y ago
    Good to know! I'm not a networking expert so figured leaving the default made sense just in case.
- ghotli 2y ago

seltzered_ 2y ago

In 2009-2010, it was rather eye-opening in the US to have an iPhone 3g/3gs both jailbroken (to run a tethering app like PDAnet) and unlocked (to use a cheaper GSM provider like T-Mobile instead of AT&T) which required all sorts of particulars like making sure the modem firmware didn't get updated. The article doesn't quite mention it but back then the other option to get internet on a laptop was a dedicated USB dongle modem or Wifi hub thing. Probably the next 'oh that's neat' moment happened a decade later when usb-c tethering became enabled such that one could tether a whole ethernet network of things to a phone if needed on occasion (e.g. broadband outages, moving to a new home)

CalRobert 2y ago
There were other options! I had a Palm Centro and ran PDANet on it - it was the only way I got internet in my house in a canyon in the country. https://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/06/09/pdanet-for-palm-os/ https://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/06/09/pdanet-for-palm-os/
bluGill 2y ago
I remember back then connecting by laptop to my cell phone via bluetooth. It was something like dialup, and only 2g speeds, but it worked on the road. I bought the first android phone a couple months latter and then I was able to tether via wifi, but still only 2g speeds. (IIRC 3g came latter) Now get off my lawn you young whippersnappers.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  The 2G stuff worked almost everywhere in the US there was cell service, and when 3G came out it was only good in the big cities for a number of years. Before USB, things that made a smartphone smart were its ability to get your laptop (or desktop) on the internet, anywhere that you had cell service. No differently than from a land line (except the land line did not charge by the minute unless it was long-distance). This is when you were paying for cellular voice service by the minute, with a certain number of free minutes included each month by this time. Dial-up ISP was on similar terms from a different provider like AOL, "always on" broadband was not very familiar yet and people were still accustomed to internet "sessions" where you log off as soon as you are finished. With cellphones and ISPs most people were still acting like every session should be limited or it could end up running their minutes over, and for the relatively few who wanted portable internet it had always been double minutes (well from two providers) in cost so the airwaves were not filled with any significant data minutes compared to voice. If it could wait people would do it on a land line, even long conversations. Oh, yeah, the cellphone itself was "on the internet" but about all it would do is email. Without a camera, color screen or very much of a keyboard the idea was to connect to a laptop if you needed portable internet. Which is why the phones eventually had a free software suite from the manufacturer which included the PC drivers for its cellular modem so you could dial-up to places like AOL. It was a virtual COM port which the PC could address like it was internal hardware, dial out to any ISP you had an account with, and the modem naturally communicated with the answering party over regular phone lines like it was supposed to do. Once AT&T itself started offering broadband, they also had toll-free phone numbers posted for account holders to use when they were not at their home router. You could dial up from any land line or smartphone. There was also a driver for the phone's virtual ethernet adapter if you wanted to use that, your phone would have an IP address. This is not the phone connecting by wifi, that came later. It was the PC software that made smartphones smart, along with removable storage, and USB networking when it came along. The early Motorola and Sony-Ericsson phones had infrared COM ports, to communicate with the early business laptops which had physical IR COM ports. Laptops were not yet affordable for very many students at all. IOW using Windows 98 over IR all you needed was the same built-in Windows apps to dial-up and log in to your ISP of choice, or alternatively autodial a fax machine and use Windows Faxing to send or receive a document straight from a file, with no paper involved at your end. Office 97 was not even necessary. Remember faxing was well established way before the internet got popular. The virtual COM ports over USB or Bluetooth came later but served the same purpose. After IR ports were long gone, the most common approach was using the USB cable but nobody called it "tethering" (that would have to wait until a different paradigm could be adopted and it could be billed for in an ongoing way). The USB cables were proprietary at one end and did cost about $30 extra so it was definitely not as popular as it could have been. Sure enough, one day somebody decided they would get more cellphone customers if they had "unlimited minutes". And also, cellular carriers gradually became ISPs themselves. But that basically meant that smartphone customers could have "always on" internet for the first time in history, even though it was not widely recognized. Over about a year period the carriers disavowed all knowledge of specialized USB communication cables. This was still before the iPhone but I could tell things were going downhill, and wanted to get some spare Sony cables before my phone was discontinued and replaced by a less capable but more expensive unit. In the retail stores you could tell they were operating from a script when they said they had never had factory USB cords, and it was the same stores where they had been in stock in earlier years. They did usher in a new generation of phones, a few of which would eventually communicate over generic USB cords. If you had a data plan, which would be charged extra, and there was no more factory cellphone software. The carrier handled it all, that's when they started calling it "tethering", always meaning that there's "supposed to be" an upcharge, and acting like it's a new feature with never-before-seen convenience. Fortunately the gigabytes have gotten liberal and it has gotten pretty convenient to enable tethering on Android, then connect any PC by USB or Bluetooth and be online. As the article says, "it was pretty messy for a while there, and it had nothing to do with the devices. It was basically the providers getting in the way."

arittr 2y ago

> I type in binary at about 30 words per minute I’ll just go quit my day job now

MisterTea 2y ago
Assuming 16 bit words that's just 60 bytes per minute.

bluedino 2y ago

For some reason I've always romanticized using a laptop + hotspot. This year due to various circumstances, I was going to start using it 24/7. I did not, however, because: T-Mobile seems to have an actual, usable and affordable plan. $50/month, but they don't offer it in my area. Verizon offers 5G home internet and it's only $35/month (I'm already a verizon wireless customer). It's available in my area, but there aren't any slots actually open for it. Their traditional 'Jetpack' options are $100/150GB of data. And using your phone as a hotspot only gives you 60GB of premium data and then you're rate limitied. ATT offers Internet Air, but they don't have any information on usage other than "In rare cases, if your usage is contributing to congestion on the network, AT&T will greatly reduce your speed for a min. of 30 min". Previously, their product wasn't offered at my address, and they also had disclaimers about not using it for media consumption or commercial use. They also allow 60GB of smartphone tethering and then throttled to 128kbs.

spogbiper 2y ago
Google Fi offers unlimited tethering for $65/month. Not sure of all the details
- password4321 2y ago
  https://support.google.com/fi/answer/9462101?hl=en https://support.google.com/fi/answer/9462101?hl=en > Unlimited Plus plans allow up to 50 GB of full-speed data. > any data used after you reach your data limit is throttled or slowed to 256 kbps
  - doubled112 2y ago
    That's not unlimited at all.
    - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
      Not a single "unlimited" plan has ever been unlimited. I think they should be required to advertise a demonstrably achievable figure instead, such as 10 TiB/month. Or better yet, a sustainable MiB/second that won't get capped down to nothing.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

My non-branded customer-provided Samsung S22 recently started being unwilling to turn on hotspotting, respecting some flag for my carrier. You can still workaround by creating a Routine to turn it on, it it was infuriating to run into. Makes me want to go back to running custom roms, but Android SafetyNet keeps making that less and less feasible. I'm switching carriers, since it seems like writing is on the wall for this important capability for me.

rustcleaner 2y ago
Pixel is mid hardware, but wins because GrapheneOS. Loudly ditch any app which locks you out for some new SafetyNet reasons (Graphene does attested boot and locks boot loader).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

swozey 2y ago

Ever since 5GUW.. maybe even just 5G, I haven't connected to a single wifi connection out working remotely than my phone. It's faster than nearly all of the bar/coffee/cowork wifis nowadays. I have 2GB (for an insane $145ish/mo) CenturyLink fiber and it's been horrible for the last 3-4 months. With that said, in my city subreddit we have a thread about how there are certain intersections/blocks that will kill your Apple Carplay while driving until you've exited the area. Th e running theory is there's a big telecom company or a defense contractor right there doing something weird.

betaby 2y ago
> I have 2GB (for an insane $145ish/mo) CenturyLink fiber and it's been horrible for the last 3-4 months. Why though? Are talking about bad Wi-Fi experience or you are not getting good speed even while connected through Ethernet. My friends with CenturyLinks have no complains.
- swozey 2y ago
  CenturyLink is absolute trash. I live in a city full of people with CenturyLink and we all hate it. I also have coworkers with CL and they have been complaining about speeds. There's an entire thread on my cities subreddit about its poor performance as of late (for me about 6+ mo). I've never used CL anywhere but Denver, it's been the BY FAR most expensive and least reliable service I've had and something over the last 6ish months for me has made it awful. I didn't have many complaints aside from price until this year. https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/1fbjx1y/centurylink_fiber_intermittent_p https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/1fbjx1y/centurylink... ing_issues/ I'm not referring to wifi at all. This is my fiber connection. I have a million devices, half of which aren't wifi. I can barely run 2-3 youtube videos at 1080p - 4k each at a time right now. If my bedroom TV is playing a 1080p my desktop on ethernet may (not always) drop to auto-360p, etc. I used to never have to think about changing my youtube video quality up higher and off auto until this year IIRC. I'm constantly changing youtube quality now or have TVs that will buffer forever if a video is playing elsewhere. On my 2GB.. The positive of CL is their Outage detector is very accurate, I guess they probably get a lot of practice.

Dwedit 2y ago

I just use TetherFi (from Pyamsoft). Works great, except for wss sockets that do not support connections through proxies. Only hairy part is configuring proxy servers on Windows. For some stupid reason, a proxy configuration script must be served from a website and not a local file. So you need to install a localhost webserver just to serve the proxy configuration script.

Thoreandan 2y ago

Carriers send tethered traffic out different networks than they do for traffic from the mobile device. Fun side effects: Apps on your phone which, when you're on wi-fi, can connect to other apps on the same wi-fi, can't. Terrible performance getting to streaming services, when apps running on the device itself talk to them fine.

killingtime74 2y ago
This is not universally true. Which network and country are you in?

somat 2y ago

Wearing my network engineer hat. I was furious when I found out tethering in android was an option that could only be set by the network provider. Why should they get any say if I want to use my phone as a router. So just on principle alone I refuse to pay the tethering tax and tether using terminux and ssh. the usability sucks in comparison to the built in method but at least I get to control my packets.

pjmlp 2y ago
I never saw that, then again we usually mostly buy Android phones pre-paid, free of any operator shenanigans.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  It doesn't matter how your got your phone. Most Android phones will respect the result of the tethering entitlement check, which is returned by your carrier.
  - adamomada 2y ago
    I did some digging around in an old jailbroken iPhone (iOS 12) to try to figure out how to stop broadcast alerts from the cell towers and there is a database on the device itself with various parameters from cell carriers around the world. So there are least some settings that are “hard-coded” in each OS release which don’t have to be sent from the carrier - the iPhone will do X based on the SIM in the phone or the network it’s roaming on. Not sure if tethering is one of the parameters , but there were quite a few.
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      Yes tethering is absolutely one of the parameters - including whether it’s enabled at all and whether it goes over its own separate APN (which is how the carrier can limit it or throttle it separately from the main data plan) or is sent in-band over the main APN used by the system (alongside other params like the number of client devices connected to the hotspot if I remember correctly). Android has a similar “carrier settings” database, although I haven’t looked too deep into what kind of settings are available.

kylehotchkiss 2y ago

Here I am waiting for Apple to put a 5g chip in MacBooks. My 5G iPad is one of my favorite tech purchases ever. Always online feels so close. Even the iPhone/Macbook tethering thing feels so sloppy and fragile. Half the time I don't see my phone in the network list. I don't want to have to think about it.

aidenn0 2y ago

I may still have the RS-232 adapter for my ~2004ish flip phone; it presented a Hayes Modem (AT commands) interface for data.

renewiltord 2y ago

I just use Google Fi and don't think about any of this stuff. International or local. Tethering or not. And it's been this way for the better part of a decade. This is like hearing someone talk about how it's hard to record a show on VHS.

saagarjha 2y ago
Google Fi also has tethering caps depending on which plan you're on.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Yeah, I just get the unlimited plan. I've had this for ages. When I've wanted to tether, I've tethered. Two button presses.

microflash 2y ago

Wow, reading all these comments makes me realise how different it is for other corners of the world compared to US. I have been working remotely with laptop + hotspot for ages. Locking such basic capability seems such a moneygrab.

rcbdev 2y ago

Another one of many things where EU citizens are blessed with more freedom than Americans. Who knew?