How can three tell im tethering

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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? Most of the packages they sell are based not on the cost of your specific consumption which is way more complex than peak bandwidth or total transfer , but the cost of typical consumption given some restrictions e. If you bunch tethered and non-tethered traffic together, the average non-tethered user will have to pay more, and the average tethered user will have to pay less, than with the two usages split assuming the same total profit.

Thus, you would lose the "cheap" non-tethering customers to competitors who do differentiate, while the expensive tethering customers would come to you. Or, if they limited bandwidth to the actual expected behavior, like the previous comment suggested, everyone would get the service they pay for regardless of device.

The only ones who don't want that are the providers who want plans to be as confusing as possible. I was recently force to pay for a higher plan specifically to unlock tethering, which is important to us for backup, since we're in the hills on a crappy ADSL connection. Their reason is that it allows them to increase revenue. They're charging for literally nothing. I get that that allows them to make more money, but charging someone for nothing generally makes that customer unhappy.

That doesn't mean I should like it, but I do think most people have no idea that tethering is completely a feature of their phone; I do take things like that into account when choosing carriers. It was one of the reasons I chose them to begin with!

But alas, the deal was altered. Just because they are both packets over the network, they are different use cases and present a feature which can be charged for. If the market is anti-competitive and exploiting that and colluding to shut down this feature, complain to the FCC. If the FCC dismisses your valid complaint for political reasons, vote out the party which put them there.

Charging people for different use case while the product is literally the same is one the most anti consumer things I can think about it, no idea why you think it's okay. Imagine a eletricity bill that had different prices if your vacumm cleaner was being used on the living room rather than say, a bedroom, I see it as simply absurd.

Except that electric utilities absolutely charge for the same electrons at different rates based on the type of usage, differentiated residential vs. I bet you even support net-neutrality. SllX on July 17, root parent prev next [—]. It is a straightforward experience, having just bought a plan in May from T-Mobile, provided you are willing to accept that market-speak is the window dressing of Life in America and you are able to find a sales rep who is willing to switch from the corporate dialect to American English.

Its not throttling. SllX on July 19, root parent next [—]. In practice, I expect what the sales rep said to remain effectively accurate because I live in a densely populated city. To be fair to wireless carriers, wireless is different than wired when it comes to bandwidth.

Theoretically, if you throw enough money at infrastructure, you can allow everyone to have truly unlimited bandwidth at the advertised rates wired.

Of course that would be cost prohibitive. Wireless is different. There is only so much bandwidth that you can have over a given frequency, only certain frequencies are available to each carrier, and only certain frequencies are conducive to cellular transmissions.

For instance for years T-mobile has horrible reception indoors because of the spectrum they had. After 50GB, you still get unlimited LTE data but may at times notice reduced speeds in areas with network congestion. In the vast majority of times and places, you will notice little if any difference. This experience is due to our data prioritization practice, which prioritizes customers who use more than 50GB of data in a single bill cycle after other customers.

This practice helps to optimize overall network performance and maintain a quality service experience for as many customers as possible. Your data usage resets at the beginning of your next billing cycle, so this practice will only apply until that time. Yeah 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.

Wait, like, formally cancel in what sense? I would expect if you wanted to cancel a service, you'd have to tell somebody about it? I 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 on July 17, root parent next [—]. Other No Contract carriers bill up front so they can just stop service if you stop paying. Change your APN in modem settings to be the same as one used for internet on the smartphone. I am not sure when they treated you right to make you surprised. On android, the phone acts as a router with its own DHCP server assigning devices a local IP address , so I doubt that information is getting passed on.

I was scrolling down the comments, starting to think nobody on HN knew networking enough to notice this. MAC addresses never "leave" the local network segment, so can't be used for tracking tethering unless the phone has code to forward this info on. But, at that point, the MAC address isn't really needed anymore ;. Does 4G even use the concept of a MAC address?

I'm not familiar enough with the protocol to comment, but MAC addresses are usually an Ethernet conecpt. I believe it does use MAC addresses, just obviously the link layer is different. It is difficult for an average user to set up a proxy, and there is still a possibility to detect PC by analyzing unencrypted DNS queries to MS domains for telemetry servers. This would really only be an issue if you don't have VPN killswitch set up on the tethered devices.

Even if this can't be prevented, disconnecting phones because they made a connection to MSFT telemetry servers can be easily turned into a DoS vector.

Want to mess with someone's internet? Back around the time this SE question was asked , I was using an awesome open-source app [1] to tether on my iPhone. It was very easy to use, though you had to be able to compile and run it yourself, as there's no way it would be allowed in the App Store.

I would be surprised if something similar didn't exist for Android. I needed to tether on train rides a few times a year, which was really not worth paying for the service. Nowadays I can do it without an exorbitant extra charge aside from the extra data that tethering guzzles , so there's no need for it. Isn't paying for tethering the digital version of buying apples, but I have to pay a premium if I want to use them in a recipe? It's more like having a different price for a buffet if you're eating in vs.

The phone data rates are set with an understanding that phones use less data than laptops. I get what you are saying, but that analogy fails as well. There is a physical limit to how much one person can eat, while there is no limit to how much someone might take home. Whereas with data, there is no limit intrinsic to tethering vs in-phone.

More to the point, in practice, people can easily use as much data in-phone as on a laptop, due to streaming video. Think, for example, of someone streaming music via YouTube for hours on end. Wowfunhappy on July 17, root parent next [—]. Does it matter whether the limit is physical or practical? On average, people use much less data when it's confined to a single phone than when they can share it with laptops. Here's a different analogy that might work better: I can shop at Costco as much as I want, and I can even buy things for other people, but I cannot literally give my Costco card to someone else and let them shop at the store on their own.

Retric on July 17, root parent next [—]. Not when they are also charging you by the bit transferred. People also deal with various data caps when tethering, they just now also deal with an extra bill for a service provided by their phone not the phone company. There are actually several tricks to make video streaming efficient for phones. The top sites are aggressively throttled [1]. This is harder to do for laptops, where users are typically connecting to corporate VPNs and stuff.

I agree with you overall, but not this reasoning. Smartphones can connect to VPN's as well. And anyone who uses a VPN can get themselves limited, just like they were using a laptop, because the carrier thinks you're trying to hide something from them. Wowfunhappy on July 18, root parent next [—]. Have you ever heard of on-phone VPN use being detected as tethering? I'd expect the victims of this to be quite upset! They can, but is it as common in practice?

I earnestly don't know. So while that doesn't really answer your question, I suspect there's a non-insignificant number of mobile VPN users. If you set up a hotspot so your friends can all anti-socially stream separate videos, that scales up beyond what one user would consume. But you can never exceed the throughput of the phone.

OJFord on July 17, root parent prev next [—]. There's the same limit on possible data usage as there as on possible food haulage: throughput. Tethering automatically subjects you to exactly the same throughput limit the phone already had; the phone needs to personally make each request.

It's a usage pattern thing, not a physical capability thing. It's why I like Google Fi. I don't have any of these arguments. I'm just fully metered and there aren't any restrictions. Much more people are going to transfer a lot of data using a computer than using a phone. An hour of YouTube on a phone is only about a gigabyte, think of how quickly you download that on a laptop. Spooky23 on July 17, parent prev next [—].

It's a service offering issue for unlimited plans, and a customer experience issue for metered. Tethering is problematic in many ways with devices that don't expect to be metered.

A Windows PC or Mac will sop up data sitting idle at a prodigious rate. For every informed consumer who understands that, there are 8 who are going to go crazy when they end up with a wacky bill. JadeNB on July 17, root parent next [—]. Thankfully, Windows finally offers a "This is a metered connection" option.

Do you know how to get the equivalent functionality on a Mac? I've looked, but can't figure it out. Do you know if there's a free app? So you probably do need relatively fine-grained control to get the same effect, as the vast majority of processes will assume the network connection is either fully up or fully down.

Apps waste way more bandwidth. It's better if you turn it around: "unlimited gas for you 4mpg hummer. But we will nickel and dime you if you try to ever fill up the 1L reserve tank on your electric scooter". AimForTheBushes on July 17, root parent prev next [—]. I like this analogy but they should just give me the compact car rate of gas for my Hummer.

Not sure if this works as an analogy. Its like if you subscribe to netflix.. You can simultaneously consume multiple streams of content. Tethering allows you to share the internet connection with other people, as well as your other devices - which is essentially you consuming multiple streams of internet data simultaneously. That's creating artificial scarcity. Paying for usage sort of makes sense, but paying for a license to share with other people? That's outrageous.

Imagine if you had to pay an extra license on your water bills for sharing water with your guests.. The cultural industry from your first example has been unjustly profiting from artists and the public alike for decades. Now ISPs need to apply this model to survive because we don't pay for bandwidth usage or for guaranteed bandwidth. So it's specifically because of their own marketing lies that ISPs now need to find ways to restrict users from sharing their access.

Good luck with that! Come on man. Bandwidth is not that expensive. Also I believe that phones consume more bandwidth than laptops. You tether your laptop for work stuff.

Actually the resolution is higher than on non-retina laptops. You need your laptop for work. It costs the ISP to have the availability to connect you up. The way a network works, is that besides upkeep which is a small percentage of TCO, upfront cost scales with total bandwidth, not total number of packets one needs to move across a set of links. Meaning if the ISP buys enough network equipment for users to each have 10mbps of available bandwidth, they no longer have costs besides upkeep maintenance, support, and replacing broken hardware.

This large lump sum in the beginning has the potential to deliver the same amount of bandwidth ad infinitum. Maintaining a constant and intensive connection to the internet, and also to your tethered device, consumes a lot more power than regular smartphone tasks. The good news is that the tethering feature is readily built in to and supported by most handsets. There may also be an Ethernet option. For USB tethering you will of course need to have connected your handset to whatever device you want to share its connection with via USB cable, at which point it should be a one-tap setup.

For a full guide to the tethering terms and limitations on every UK network check out the link above. See Deal. Home News Tethering explained - all you need to know. Tethering explained - all you need to know 17th June With Wi-Fi hotspots growing more ubiquitous by the day, the need for tethering has diminished somewhat in recent times. Table of Contents What is tethering? Cheapest Superfast ISPs.

Large Availability View All. New Forum Topics. Dishy 2. Community Fibre. A Nightmare! Author : Ellastonepaul.