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Comment by m0ngr31 | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty impressive setup. Recently I lived in an RV for a year and my setup was much more janky than this...

Basically consisted of a gl.inet router that I plugged in a old Moto X4. This allowed me to get wifi from whichever campsite we stayed at (always garbage) and then I would pay for 100GB from Cricket and T-Mobile. I would swap sims when I would run out of data about half way through the month.

Then I discovered I could get unlimited data on Cricket with a regular phone plan if I changed the TTL on the router. Ended up being the most stable option for the last few months.

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Visible is a Verizon subsidiary with unlimited everything for $25/month with “Party Pay” and no contract.

You can tether with it and the only trade off is that you get deprioritized first in crowded environments.

There’s also no store, but I see that as an improvement.

That was the first one I tried, but I was getting data speeds of about .1 Mbps

Interesting - must be regional I guess, I get good speeds where I use it.

Same here, tried it on out last time out with the travel trailer. Canceled the plan after we got back home as it was terrible, and not to speak that we were in areas where it should have run flawless. Ended up using my main phone's connection for some of the work i had to do.

Visible's tethering is limited to 5Mbps (according to their pricing page). Have you been getting more than 5Mbps tethering? Do you do anything to get around tethering speed limits?

Deprioritization can be hard in some areas. Verizon has the most customers and the least spectrum at the moment.

I think I've gotten more than 5mbps (or at least was for a time) - I haven't done anything, but I might be wrong about this (I don't rely on tethering most of the time so haven't noticed).

IIRC a long time ago all of Visible's data speed was capped at 5mbps and that was the 'tradeoff' of the low cost service in addition to deprioritization. They eventually dropped that cap, but it's possible it still exists for tethering.

I will plug Starlink for those that can get it though - not mobile yet, but we went from a crappy calnet connection to a stable 50+ sometimes 150+ mbps connection. When they get it working across cells (which Musk tweeted interest about) it'd be a pretty sweet option for an RV. If you're out in the boonies though and looking for stable home internet, it can't be beat (as long as you have a clear view of the sky).

that’s quite interesting, do you mind elaborating on your last sentence? How does that work?

With some carriers, it can bypass tethering quotas, appearing as if usage is originating from the "phone".

I setup a firewall rule in openwrt that said anything coming over USB needed to set the TTL to 65 so it looked like the data was coming from the phone itself and not from the tether.

IIRC, on the plan I was using on Cricket, I would get unlimited data + 15GB of tether. This just byapssed that limit.

I think they can almost figure it out because if I tried to tether without the TTL trick, data wouldn't work. So I'm guessing it still counted the data I was using against some kind of cap?

On Android, there are apps that you can install that do this for you.

I used to use them a lot when I was traveling with my laptop a few years ago and it always worked great.

Years ago, I did this with my jailbroken iphone 3gs. When visiting lots of websites, it would serve up the mobile version, so I assumed that the app was somehow modifying request headers to look like a phone request. I guess not as many sites used TLS back then.

Can you mention some? I've been having an issue with my phone having its hotspot limited to under 1mbps.

I switched to iPhone and can’t even remember the name of the app anymore, sorry

But the good news is that I got it from the Play Store back then and you didn’t even need to jailbreak.

I’ll admit I don’t know much about networking, but what’s special about 65?

That's the TTL that some carriers use from the phone. So once it hits the router it goes down - meaning the carrier knows you're tethering. Setting it to back to 65 on the router makes it harder for the carrier to detect.

Close, but it's a little bit different than how you describe it. The router is connected between the phone and the other devices in this user's scenario. The default TTL on Linux and Android is 64. If you tether, the packet will go through your phone and have its TTL decremented to 63 (the phone is a gateway). Then when it arrives at the cell tower with a lower TTL, they know you're tethering and drop the packet.

If you set it to 65 on your host device or router, it will be decremented to 64 on the phone - and is now hard to distinguish from real traffic from the phone.

I was bit confused while trying to digest the TTL hack up thread, but your explanation completed cleared up my confusion, so thank you for that.

So 65 isn't necessarily the correct value, but whatever the phone's default is?

You want it to be one more than the value the phone uses as its default. Then when the packet arrives at the phone via the tether its TTL is decremented and it is passed out to the tower. Tower sees a packet with a TTL that it is expecting and assumes it is phone data.

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