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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, howev

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.
      - doubled112 2y ago
        Could you imagine if the water company worked like an ISP? You can't use an unlimited amount of water either. "You can pay a flat rate for unlimited use, but after you use 3,000L of water, we will reduce service to your house to 1/10th the normal pressure" It's fine, you just have to wait 40 minutes between flushes.
        drozycki 2y ago
        But the water utility charges per unit consumed
      - mdasen 2y ago
        That's not really true. All three carriers have top tier plans that are actually unlimited for mobile data (without slowing down). Many MVNOs have "unlimited" plans that are definitely not unlimited. If a plan offers 50GB of high-speed data and then throttles the connection to 256kbps, it's a 50GB plan. By contrast, a plan like T-Mobile's Go 5G Plus/Next plans never slow your mobile data. Other plans like T-Mobile's Go 5G (regular) will be lower priority once you've used 100GB. That lower priority averages 11-15% slower. Most of the time, the network isn't congested and it doesn't matter. You get virtually the same speed as truly unlimited plans. 11-15% slower isn't the same as getting throttled to 256kbps. Of course, it will depend on network conditions. If you're at a fireworks show or a music festival, lower priority might be a lot slower. There are options if you want truly unlimited mobile data. If you're looking for hotspot, that's harder. T-Mobile does offer its Away Unlimited plan for $160/mo, but that is lower priority - 13-30% slower at the 25th and 75th percentiles. 77-292 Mbps from the 25th to 75th percentiles is pretty decent performance, but if you end up in an area with lots of network congestion, then you're low priority.
        bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
        My primary point was that peak bandwidth and billing period are finite, so no plan is truly unlimited. When a customer is comparing the 500 MB plan to the "infinite" plan, they could have actually given a number.
  - roninorder 2y ago
    I really hope the phone starts making dial-up connection sounds when it slows down to 256 kbps.
bluGill 2y ago
Politics - Verizon has long been short on bandwidth, but more radio was made available a few years back the terms were setup such that Verizon decided forced to sit out, while t-mobile got it for cheap (AT&T didn't need it and so didn't bid). Now t-mobile has lots of radio bandwidth, and so is selling it. Verizon needs customers to go elsewhere, but they still have the least coverage gaps so many are staying despite the high prices. (this isn't a good problem - if tmobile gets just a few more gaps in service closed people will go there and Verizon will be forced to lower prices to keep existing customers while tmobile has more volume of customers)
ssl-3 2y ago
The workaround I've been using is Visible[0], which I pay $35/month for [normally $45, but deals often exist]. I get 50GB of data at a higher priority, and then unlimited data at a lower priority. It's not a deliberate or fixed speed limit -- it's just QoS, and after 50GB it's the same QoS as their lower-tier $25 plan always has. On both sides of the QoS fence, loosely speaking: If the network is congested in an area, things get slow. If the network has good coverage and is not congested, then things are fast enough -- dozens of Mbps in both directions is typical with my old phone's somewhat-limited available 5G NSA or LTE CA modes. (Sometimes, it's triple-digit Mbps, which amusing and frankly overkill for my use.) With TTL=65, this works fine for me in my neck of the woods. I need tethering when I need it, though I don't need it often. But in some circumstances (some friends and I do a technology-laden form of "camping" sometimes and one of my roles there is to provide Internet) I burn through quite a lot of data. [1]: Visible is a part of Verizon, and has always been. The chief difference other than different pricing is that it comes with even worse customer support, if you can believe that.
- mdasen 2y ago
  According to Visible, their tethering is limited to 5Mbps on their low-tier plan and 10Mbps on their upper-tier plan. That's still useful - you can even watch Netflix and stuff. However, the tethering is limited in speed. The mobile data isn't limited in speed, just lower priority as you note.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    It’s also capped to support only a single tethered device, at least on iPhones. The fact that Visible/Verizon can even get my (unlocked, full price) iPhone to cooperate in limiting itself in that way in the first place makes me pretty sad.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    That's the official party line, more or less. By design, there is a hard bandwidth limit on tethering. There's also a device limit. Eg, if one were to buy a new phone and put a new Visible SIM into that phone and tether their new MacBook with it, and do nothing else, the speed would indeed be limited and this limit would be enforced at the carrier level, and furthermore connecting a second device would be theoretically impossible. But setting TTL to 65 has been very effective every time I've done it, whereby: The speed of tethering is about the same as the speed of data on the pocket computer itself at any given time. And I've never actually run into a device limit, even without tricks. (So yeah, there's reasons for my camping rig to have a USB 3 ethernet adapter for a phone, with USB PD passthrough. I wouldn't care so much if 10Mbps were all that could be accomplished, but things are not necessarily slow like that at all if you're holding it right. There's a million other ways to skin this cat. A cheap travel router is one way. A cheap USB WiFi adapter on a laptop is another. Setting TTL forever is a one-liner on Windows. And y'all know how to do NAT.)

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.
    - doubled112 2y ago
      Could you imagine if the water company worked like an ISP? You can't use an unlimited amount of water either. "You can pay a flat rate for unlimited use, but after you use 3,000L of water, we will reduce service to your house to 1/10th the normal pressure" It's fine, you just have to wait 40 minutes between flushes.
      - drozycki 2y ago
        But the water utility charges per unit consumed
    - mdasen 2y ago
      That's not really true. All three carriers have top tier plans that are actually unlimited for mobile data (without slowing down). Many MVNOs have "unlimited" plans that are definitely not unlimited. If a plan offers 50GB of high-speed data and then throttles the connection to 256kbps, it's a 50GB plan. By contrast, a plan like T-Mobile's Go 5G Plus/Next plans never slow your mobile data. Other plans like T-Mobile's Go 5G (regular) will be lower priority once you've used 100GB. That lower priority averages 11-15% slower. Most of the time, the network isn't congested and it doesn't matter. You get virtually the same speed as truly unlimited plans. 11-15% slower isn't the same as getting throttled to 256kbps. Of course, it will depend on network conditions. If you're at a fireworks show or a music festival, lower priority might be a lot slower. There are options if you want truly unlimited mobile data. If you're looking for hotspot, that's harder. T-Mobile does offer its Away Unlimited plan for $160/mo, but that is lower priority - 13-30% slower at the 25th and 75th percentiles. 77-292 Mbps from the 25th to 75th percentiles is pretty decent performance, but if you end up in an area with lots of network congestion, then you're low priority.
      - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
        My primary point was that peak bandwidth and billing period are finite, so no plan is truly unlimited. When a customer is comparing the 500 MB plan to the "infinite" plan, they could have actually given a number.
- roninorder 2y ago
  I really hope the phone starts making dial-up connection sounds when it slows down to 256 kbps.

bluGill 2y ago

Politics - Verizon has long been short on bandwidth, but more radio was made available a few years back the terms were setup such that Verizon decided forced to sit out, while t-mobile got it for cheap (AT&T didn't need it and so didn't bid). Now t-mobile has lots of radio bandwidth, and so is selling it. Verizon needs customers to go elsewhere, but they still have the least coverage gaps so many are staying despite the high prices. (this isn't a good problem - if tmobile gets just a few more gaps in service closed people will go there and Verizon will be forced to lower prices to keep existing customers while tmobile has more volume of customers)

ssl-3 2y ago

The workaround I've been using is Visible[0], which I pay $35/month for [normally $45, but deals often exist]. I get 50GB of data at a higher priority, and then unlimited data at a lower priority. It's not a deliberate or fixed speed limit -- it's just QoS, and after 50GB it's the same QoS as their lower-tier $25 plan always has. On both sides of the QoS fence, loosely speaking: If the network is congested in an area, things get slow. If the network has good coverage and is not congested, then things are fast enough -- dozens of Mbps in both directions is typical with my old phone's somewhat-limited available 5G NSA or LTE CA modes. (Sometimes, it's triple-digit Mbps, which amusing and frankly overkill for my use.) With TTL=65, this works fine for me in my neck of the woods. I need tethering when I need it, though I don't need it often. But in some circumstances (some friends and I do a technology-laden form of "camping" sometimes and one of my roles there is to provide Internet) I burn through quite a lot of data. [1]: Visible is a part of Verizon, and has always been. The chief difference other than different pricing is that it comes with even worse customer support, if you can believe that.

mdasen 2y ago
According to Visible, their tethering is limited to 5Mbps on their low-tier plan and 10Mbps on their upper-tier plan. That's still useful - you can even watch Netflix and stuff. However, the tethering is limited in speed. The mobile data isn't limited in speed, just lower priority as you note.
- lxgr 2y ago
  It’s also capped to support only a single tethered device, at least on iPhones. The fact that Visible/Verizon can even get my (unlocked, full price) iPhone to cooperate in limiting itself in that way in the first place makes me pretty sad.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  That's the official party line, more or less. By design, there is a hard bandwidth limit on tethering. There's also a device limit. Eg, if one were to buy a new phone and put a new Visible SIM into that phone and tether their new MacBook with it, and do nothing else, the speed would indeed be limited and this limit would be enforced at the carrier level, and furthermore connecting a second device would be theoretically impossible. But setting TTL to 65 has been very effective every time I've done it, whereby: The speed of tethering is about the same as the speed of data on the pocket computer itself at any given time. And I've never actually run into a device limit, even without tricks. (So yeah, there's reasons for my camping rig to have a USB 3 ethernet adapter for a phone, with USB PD passthrough. I wouldn't care so much if 10Mbps were all that could be accomplished, but things are not necessarily slow like that at all if you're holding it right. There's a million other ways to skin this cat. A cheap travel router is one way. A cheap USB WiFi adapter on a laptop is another. Setting TTL forever is a one-liner on Windows. And y'all know how to do NAT.)