What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook? Data is data.

        • wander1236@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          When T-Mobile moved to unlimited with the ONE plans, they gave You “unlimited” tethering at “3G speeds”, which turned out to be 0.5Mbit/s, an unusably slow speed in 2018.

          The Magenta plans gave you 5GB-50GB of full-speed tethering before dropping you to “3G speeds”. The current Go5G plans are similar, with a limited amount of usable tethering data before you’re, for all practical uses, cut off.

          Before the ONE plans, there technically was no hotspot usage limit, but since you had a limited amount of high-speed data, your hotspot was effectively limited to whatever your plan gave you.

          All the US carriers limit hotspot usage, partly to prevent someone hooking up a computer to download 50TB of pirated movies while clogging up the bandwidth for everyone else on that tower, and (moreso) partly because they’re greedy.

          • Serinus@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            If it were just bandwidth issues, they’d only limit you during times of congestion.

            It’s pure greed.

          • tyler@programming.dev
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            7 months ago

            3g speeds are fine, no clue what you’re talking about. I literally tether all the time and when I hit the limit it’s still completely usable, even for YouTube. And getting to that limit is well above the 5gb from ATT. Like I said, att is shit, T-Mobile doesn’t do this and hasn’t for years.

            Literally every carrier on the planet limits hotspot data in some manner. This isn’t a US thing.

      • Tacostrange@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        The ISP shouldn’t care what kind of traffic is going through the network and show it down by type. It should be neutral to it

        • Nurgle@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Right… they can still impose data caps. They’ll just do the cap at the plan level, like most already do. OPs just on a cheap plan.

    • rainynight65@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      Net neutrality isn’t going to do a thing about this kind of stuff. In a best case scenario, you’ll end up with overall data usage limitations - no more ‘unlimited mobile data’.

      ISPs meter data usage because it’s pretty much the only way they can impose some form of limitation on a finite capacity to provide such data to you and other customers - other than data rate limits (read: slower speeds). They can’t guarantee data rates in almost any setup, because ultimately, while ‘data usage’ is a bit of an artificial construct and ‘data’ is not in any way finite, the pipes that deliver the data certainly are of finite capacity. Mobile data capacity - and in fact, any wireless medium - is a shared medium, the more people try to use it simultaneously, the less pleasant it’s going to be for each individual user. Ask Starlink users in many US areas how overselling limited capacity impacts the individual user.

      Mobile data usage also has different usage patterns than if you’re hotspotting your PC. You’re not going to download massive games or other bandwidth hogs to your mobile. You probably won’t be running a torrent client either. So they can give you unlimited mobile data because you’re simply not going to put as much of a strain on the infrastructure with pure on-device usage than you will with hotspotting.

      This isn’t a defense of what AT&T is doing. But net neutrality isn’t going to force them to suddenly be all ethical. It’s not going to make them provision infrastructure that doesn’t fall over at the first signs of higher-than-usual load. And it certainly can’t change the physical realities of wireless data communication. In an ideal world ISPs wouldn’t be so greedy and/or beholden to greedy shareholders to be cutting corners, and instead provide sufficient infrastructure that can handle high demand.

      And to those who are talking about their workarounds: you may not like it but you’ve signed a contract. That contract stipulates acceptable use, and if you’re found to be breaching the contract terms, the other party is within their rights to terminate the contract. Again, in an ideal world these contract terms would be more balanced towards the needs of the customer, but in the meantime your best recourse against unfavourable contract terms is to take your business elsewhere. And if you can’t do that, everything else is at your own risk.

      • Tacostrange@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        If they didn’t have the bandwidth, I don’t think T-Mobile would offer home Internet and advertise it as much as they do

        • rainynight65@feddit.de
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          But where are they offering it? Big cities and densely populated areas where people have options and therefore won’t swarm to the product? Or are they offering it in small, remote towns where there’s not a lot of competition?

          Where I live, mobile home internet is not available outside of metro areas and larger cities, and in the regions mobile towers are chronically underprovisioned and overloaded.

  • shani66@ani.social
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    This is one of those ‘innovations’ people mean when they say capitalism drives innovation. Not the hotspot, the pointless extra charge for something your phone can just do on its own.

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    How do they know if the source of data is hotspot? I’d imagine there is a way to stop your phone grassing on you.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      There’s different internal network configs (APNs), and hotspot uses a different one than regular mobile data. ( or at least it used to). Those can be configured and metered separately from the carrier’s end.

      LineageOS, and maybe some other custom ROMs, wouldn’t do that and would put the hotspot and mobile data on the same APN to get around that.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        Even on my unlocked, non vendor phone it seems to not recognize hotspot data as different for some reason.

    • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
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      Back when they just began recognizing it, they noted peculiar traffic. Desktop websites, batch downloads normally unavailable to that system. This assumes that you utilized the internal hotspot system and didn’t create a separate one. Now? Not sure whether their system is more robust but it should, theoretically, be possible to obfuscate your traffic using third party hotspot software. No clue where to look for that anymore.

      • sparky1337@ttrpg.network
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        7 months ago

        I used to routinely use 100gb of data on my jailbroken sprint iPhone. Did that for almost 3 years. Never heard a peep from them. But this was forever ago.

        • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
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          If you used the package I think you did, that’s not unusual. Absolutely will not remember the name but there were numerous tweaks that just flipped the hotspot switch but a couple that allowed you to use a hotspot without directly using the inbuilt function. One was free and broadly used.

        • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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          That was great, and you didn’t have to pay some extra tethering fee every month either (or something like that, it was so long ago for me).

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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          Yeah, installing a new OS on a phone isn’t something you do easily like on a PC.

          You have to unlock the bootloader, which requires an unlock code from the manufacturer, then you have to factory reset it, and that’s even if your phone/carrier allows it. Many don’t (which is why it’s so hard for me to replace my phone…grrr).

          So yeah, installing a new OS on your phone is typically going to require quite a bit of effort and some level of commitment as well as a device that’s bootloader unlockable and supported by an alternate OS (each device and model requires a custom build).

          It’s…a whole thing. It really shouldn’t be, but it is :(

          • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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            I haven’t done it in a while, but it kinda depends on the phone, some were very easy to flash in the earlier days of Android.

            • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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              Yeah, my old Moto Play G4 was a breeze. Wasn’t quite “Press any key to continue” but not much more difficult.

              My OnePlus was a little more work, but that was mostly because of the OP website acting up and refusing to generate my bootloader unlock key. Also had to do things differently since it didn’t have an SD card to hold my install stuff like the Moto Play did.

              • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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                I had one where you could literally run an app on the phone, no ADB or anything. Can’t remember what phone it was now but it might’ve actually been a Moto Droid

                • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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                  One one hand, that sounds extremely convenient. On the other, I shudder thinking what a malicious app could do with that 😆

                  Edit: Unless you’re talking about doing it through TWRP. I had to flash that over fastboot, but once installed to the recovery partition, I could boot into that and install the rest of Lineage and extra packages straight from the SD card. Updating the system was just downloading the new Lineage .zip to the SD card, booting into TWRP, and clicking install.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 months ago

          Maybe, but it’s not worth it just for a few days, which is all I’ll need it for. I just forked over $15 for another 10 gb.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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    What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook?

    The difference is the cellular company’s profits amount.

    • Oneobi@lemmy.world
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      They had this restriction in the UK where the networks would prevent hotspots from actually working. You had to buy a special additional package.

      Restriction has now vanished and there are no such limits on usage. Not sure if the Regulator intervened but it was most certainly a cash grab.

      These days they still manage to rip us off by annual contract increases of RPI+3.9%. That applies even during a 2 year contract.

    • GroundedGator@lemmy.world
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      I think this is also an archaic model from before smart phones and the early days of smart phones. In the early days of apps, most attempted to limit data usage because most network providers charged a premium for data and the networks were much slower and smaller.

      While you could tether in these early days, even before smart phones, the computer was capable of much higher data usage than the phone. These limits were put in place to protect a network that wasn’t really built for this level of load.

      Old rules with good purpose turned into a way to charge more money.

  • VeganCheesecake
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    7 months ago

    My ISP’s a dick, but to my knowledge, unlimited has to mean unlimited around here. There where months where we had Problems with our fibre, so I did everything over a hotspot from my phone. Used 100’s of GB’s no one ever complained.

    Get proper consumer protection laws, people.

    • YeetPics@mander.xyz
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      7 months ago

      Get proper consumer protection laws, people.

      And if you’re homeless, just buy a house 🫶

      • VeganCheesecake
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        It wasn’t supposed to be quite serious, but yeah, depending on where you live it’s pretty much a lost cause, at least in the short-, or even mid-term.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      7 months ago

      unlimited has to mean unlimited around here.

      This is the case in a lot of countries. In Australia, some ISPs got fined a lot of money (something like $300,000 I think?) because they advertised mobile phone plans as “unlimited” when in reality they slowed down the speed once you hit a limit.

      • VeganCheesecake
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        7 months ago

        Dunno if 300k is necessarily a lot for an ISP, but having rules and fining firms for non-compliance is pretty nice.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          it’s not especially in the US, i’ve seen ISPs essentially break kneecaps forcing the consume to pay for the initial hook up, and then immediately rolling it out to every available house in the subdivision or neighborhood.

          That shit should be illegal. If you do the math on how long it would take to profit from running it yourself it’s only a few years given an ENTIRE neighborhood.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          The maximum ISPs could be fined for misleading/deceptive conduct (including things like this) was $1.1 million at the time, and I don’t think they considered this bad enough to hand out the maximum fine. They bumped the maximum to $10 million at some point afterwards though.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      Get proper consumer protection laws, people.

      California is trying its best, but I’m not sure the other US states will get onboard (except New York, and maybe Oregon and Washington state).

      • VeganCheesecake
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        7 months ago

        Yeah. I mean, the state I live in right now just passed a bill to forbid officers of the state from using gender neutral, but technically grammatically incorrect language, while the ruling party is campaigning on not being a party of bans, while claiming their rivals are, so things aren’t all that green here either.

        I say take the wins you can get.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Which is bullshit. Who cares if you download something at full speed on your phone or through the hotpot? A bit is a bit, doesn’t matter where it ends up when received by the phone’s modem.

    • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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      It’s a sneaky way of having a bandwidth cap without having a bandwidth cap. Mobile devices have smaller storage, so you’re less likely to use as much bandwidth compared to a laptop. Also a single device going to use less data than multiple devices sharing a hotspot.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        Jokes on them, I have a 512GB micrSD card and I use Termux to archive videos through YT-DLP.

        • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          Was just going to say… my phone has 512GB storage and can do direct WiFi file transfer to my computer without a hotspot. All without using the mobile hotspot feature.

      • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 months ago

        You can burn through a huge amount of data streaming 4K video on your phone without using any storage. You can also plug a 20TB USB hard drive into your phone, connect to a VPN and torrent away.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The carrier who’s paying for your traffic. You’re most likely going to use a lot more data on a computer than actually on your phone.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    If it’s an android phone, enable dev mode, install adb on your laptop, run an sshd under termux on the phone, and you should be able to set up iptables to forward packets from the laptop through the phone. The phone won’t know that it’s being used for tethering. Although I hadn’t seen the stuff about packet TTL before. Maybe it’s as simple as just adjusting that.

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      A less complicated method that I used for years:

      • Install SimpleSSHD on your phone
      • If you’re running Windows, install PuTTY on your PC
      • Connect to SimpleSSHD through PuTTY/ssh and set a parameter for dynamic forwarding (CLI option is -D 8888)
      • Set your web browser or application to use SOCKS5 proxy at localhost port 8888

      It doesn’t redirect all traffic (you’d want to avoid system updates, for example) but might be easier than messing with iptables.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        It may be easier to just run a VPN on the phone and route the traffic through it? WireGuard runs on Android. I’ve never tried configuring it to forward data through it though, but it should work.

        • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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          I tried that, the carrier could still differentiate it from local traffic (or at least my speed test results were vastly different).

          • dan@upvote.au
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            7 months ago

            It’s possible they’ve gotten smarter these days.

            I don’t know how ISPs are allowed to do this when it’s a very obvious violation of net neutrality.

            • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              If I recall correctly, they justify it by claiming they need to do deep packet inspection to balance traffic. There’s a fuzzy line between them needing to optimize their network equipment and respecting privacy, and the rulings seem to favor the former.

      • Armageddon@ttrpg.network
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        7 months ago

        This is what I’ve been using and it works for the most part other than the connection just dropping with too much use, only other thing I’ve used is PairVPN which had the same problem but was 100x worse. Is there something better around nowadays? I have a carrier locked phone and can’t ROM or root

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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    Att et al keeps throwing around the word ‘unlimited’. I actually had a conversation with Verizon, before I dropped them, and actually used this exact quote to the guy…

    He was like, “princess bride. Nice. But, yeah, I have to read the script.”

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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    7 months ago

    It’s a really weird and very American problem. Our home broadband either doesn’t exist or is really expensive in any given market, and tends to have clauses, conditions, etc. Like Comcrap limiting people to 1TB/mon (very easy to burn through quickly by just watching some television programs) unless they pay more for “unlimited”. People, as taught by Capitalism, hunt for the best deals. Paying one bill instead of two saves money. Some have light enough home Internet requirements that they don’t need expensive home broadband.

    Then the companies get pissed that we’re doing what we are supposed to do, find the best deal for our needs, so they set up false gates to make sure we follow the path they want us to follow. Then they pay off the regulatory agencies to allow terms like “unlimited” mean not unlimited, 3G HSPA+ being known as 4G. 4G being known as LTE, 4GLTE or 5Ge. 5G being known as 5G, 5G+, 5GUW, 5GUC, (even though, with the exception of T-Mobile in many markets, that 5G will actually be non-standalone and anchored to an LTE packet core, not 5G SA) and all the other damn arbitrary marketing buzzwords. All of which really mean nothing because the 5G spec allows a carrier to flip on the 5G availability flag on a phone even if 5G doesn’t exist in your market.

    Most of this, AT&T is the biggest perpetrator of by far. Especially the lying about 5G.

    The rules are all made up, nothing is real. Time for the arbitrary monthly bill increase for no reason! Pay up, chump!

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      I still feel like I should be able to sue AT&T for claiming my hotspot is “unlimited,” but after 15 gb it drops to double digit kbps. Seems like that’s a pretty hard limit

      • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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        Especially given:

        • Limited to 15GB
        • Then limited to 128kbps

        The 15GB is going to be variable based on the link speed available. If full 5G, that can be erased with 15 speed tests in a few minutes.

        From there, it’s 128kbps * 3600 (to hours) * 24 (to days) * 30 (to month) = 331,776,000 kilobits -> 41.472GB + the original 15GB -> 56.472GB is the limit each month for “unlimited”, roughly. A hard limited number.

        • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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          And some douchebag could come in and say “um, actually, it’s always going to be limited because the internet speed isn’t infinite” as if the 3TB my mobile data is capable of downloading at full speed is at all comparable to the 0.05TB I can get after they rate limit me

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      Yep, lack of broadband in this AirBnB I’m staying in is the only reason I was using it as a hotspot in the first place. The speed here is about the speed they’d throttle it at. I kind of had to fork over the $15 or deal with slow internet one way or the other.

      • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 months ago

        It always blows my mind going to a rental and the rental has no or lacking Internet. Yes, I’m probably on vacation, but it’s the future and life requires a few megabits. Years back I made it standard procedure to prep some kind of mobile broadband for my destination (buying a month of prepaid for a hotspot or whatever) fully expecting it to just always suck, it’s annoying that this is still a necessary procedure in 2024.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          Unfortunately, I didn’t pick it. My mother is paying. And when I asked my mother if she looked to see on the AirBnB ad if this place had high speed internet, she said, “other ads did, but this one didn’t.” Sigh.

  • Veraxus@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Data is data in the same way water is water and electricity is electricity; nobody should have the power to dictate how you use it. I really wish we’d enshrine genuine net neutrality and shut this kind of nonsense down.

    • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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      Except there is not a physical commodity or production at the other end of which they are supplying me a portion of a finite amount. If they “pipe” is big enough to supply what is promised to every end user it is supplied to, the water company or power company can still run out of water or power if one person uses a ridiculous amount. The ISP can’t run out of “data”, they aren’t even supplying it - it comes from a host. The ISP is just responsible for running the cables, or “connecting the pipes”.

      The ISPs loves using the comparison to water or power, because you get charged more for using more of either and that is how they have convinced lawmakers (who are so old and out of touch they have no idea how the internet works) that using more data should cost more. They’ve convinced our lawmakers basically that they have a big “tank full of data” and if I use too much, there wont’ be any for my neighbors.

      The truth is they are selling me something they can’t provide - a 250Gbps “pipe” that can’t actually supply 250Gbps if everyone they sold it to wants to use it at the same time. They sell the same pipe to the whole neighborhood and blame the neighborhood when they try to use what they were told they bought.

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    you also have unlimited data, unless you hit a data cap, and then you hit a data rate limit, so technically your data is actually limited.

    Can we legislate these fucks to just actual provide the bandwidth they claim to? I.E. a max cap of the max bandwidth * the max amount of time it can be available for in a billing period. Anything else is fraud IMO.

    • Dettweiler@lemmy.world
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      We had legislation for this stuff. Then Trump put Shit Pai in the FCC chairman spot and proceeded to gut all of the net neutrality and consumer protection regulations.

  • 4am@lemm.ee
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    You see, this is why we need net neutrality

    EDIT: see, im glad someone else said it already

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        No differentiation of traffic. Eg hotspots vs mobile apps can’t be a separate limit. So 5Gb/month has to be for everything or it must be for nothing.

    • orangeboats@lemmy.world
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      Not sure if it’s still the case today, but back then cellular ISPs could tell you are tethering by looking at the TTL (time to live) value of your packets.

      Basically, a packet starts with a TTL of 64 usually. After each hop (e.g. from your phone to the ISP’s devices) the TTL is decremented, becoming 63, then 62, and so on. The main purpose of TTL is to prevent packets from lingering in the network forever, by dropping the packet if its TTL reaches zero. Most packets reach their destinations within 20 hops anyway, so a TTL of 64 is plenty enough.

      Back to the topic. What happens when the ISP receives a packet with a TTL value less than expected, like 61 instead of 62? It realizes that your packet must have gone through an additional hop, for example when it hopped from your laptop onto your phone, hence the data must be tethered.

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        7 months ago

        This also explains why VPN is a possible workaround to this issue.

        Your VPN will encapsulate any packets that your phone will send out inside a new packet (its contents encrypted), and this new packet is the one actually being sent out to the internet. What TTL does this new packet have? You guessed it, 64. From the ISP’s perspective, this packet is no different than any other packets sent directly from your phone.

        BUT, not all phones will pass tethered packets to the VPN client – they directly send those out to the internet. Mine does this! In this case, TTL-based tracking will still work. And some phones seem to have other methods to inform the ISP that the data is tethered, in which case the VPN workaround may possibly fail.

    • Billegh@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If you’re using the built-in unmodified hotspot on pretty much all phones these days, mobile data for the hotspot goes through a different apn. Your phone requests data on one channel, while hotspot data goes through another.