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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Why do people use the USB tether? The WiFi hotspot always works perfectly, it's an open protocol etc.

USB tether is one less wireless signal to worry about. If you're tethering for a long time you're probably plugging your phone into your laptop anyway, to charge it.

I always disliked wired tether and USB cellular modems because Linux thinks it knows about the link state and will close all your sockets if you briefly lost the carrier, whereas with WiFi tethering Linux is never aware of whether the phone has a carrier or not. The ergonomics are much nicer, imho.

I admit I never tried the wired mode on iOS. Maybe it doesn't propagate the link state?

This is a silly solution, but can you solve this by creating a bridge device and putting the cellular modem (and nothing else) on the bridge? Then the link state of the bridge should remain up.

Unlike cellular modems, the iPhone acts as a router and the link state it propagates is the link state of a (virtual) interface connected to that router, independent of the state of the upstream cellular interface.

I wonder why my experience is so different. I primarily use it while taking the train to my parents and for the second part of the journey the signal is bouncing between 2g/3g/no signal but I've not encountered this.

Three reasons for me:

* It disconnects more than once per day, requiring me to enable the wifi hotspot again on the phone

* The phone gets very hot

* It is slower than usb tethering: In my measurements, I get about 4MByte/s over USB and around 2MByte/s with wifi, though I'm not too confident in the results. According to the mobile provider, I should get 10.

EDIT: A fourth one is that the wifi hotspot leaks my first name and phone brand to everyone in the vicinity.

For the fourth point, the network uses the phone’s name set in General->About->Name, which can be anything you want. But your phone brand would probably still be leaked to those who might care by looking at the BSSID of the network (does iOS 14’s MAC address randomization affect those as well?).

That worked, thank you!

> Why do people use the USB tether? The WiFi hotspot always works perfectly, it's an open protocol etc.

My mobile is an Android device, but I believe these reasons all still apply:

* lower power consumption for both devices with wifi off

* significantly lower & more stable ping. i drop from ~44ms with a lot of jitter (a significant number of 120ms pings) to mostly stable <35ms, with a very occasional high ping.

* better-re-sharing. if i am hosting a bunch on a phone, with USB i can bring a mobile travel router with me that has much better range & works with many more users. (it's possible that wifi extender mode may emulate some of this advantage, but it would almost certainly double the jitter problem)

Very good question! :-)

You can use your mobile as a Wifi-to-USB dongle and dont have to care about wireless credentials which is very nice. This is not possible with a wifi hotspot because in Hotspot mode you cannot use your wifi in parallel.

I do use that with a mobile router that supports Android's usb-cdc-ethernet adapter to forward hotel wifis when i only have one code for a single device (mac address). Or when the wifi gadget you want to use doesnt work with the captive portal. Fast and hassle free.

When tethering to a desktop without WiFi. And assuming wifi-usb dongles are not an option. (They can be a little finicky on certain Linux versions)

Personally the wifi version of wireless hotspot was always finicky for me on Linux, requiring a few restarts of the hotspot and the computer wifi to get synced up.

Wired tethering always worked instantly. Well, until now sadly :(. I tried to do this the other day and I just figured something was bugged, but I didn’t realise it is an iOS14 issue. Guess I am stuck with the wifi hotspot for now when I am out and about.

I use a desktop. USB tether works well (I have android phone, not apple) for me. Why bother setting up wifi and buy additional device to make it work with my desktop?

I use it to get a console for mobile safari. It does the weirdest things - like truncating input fields if they are too long

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