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Comment by bonyt | Hacker News Reader

The message says that the user's "cellular plan doesn’t support iCloud Private Relay," so is this the same thing they've done with other VPN providers? That is, do they just count the traffic against the tethering/hotspot limit, since they can't shape traffic on it to, e.g., limit video quality to 480p when a user has a plan with that limitation? I don't know if they actually do this, but I've heard it before.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/9ja8y1/i_can_confi...

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No, they do not allow users to enable Private Relay at all because Apple allows carriers to determine whether it's available or not. Even FaceTime over cellular is still something that carriers get to decide whether to allow or not, although I'm not aware of any carriers that don't.

Why is Apple even giving them an option in this?

Because Apple wants to keep their carrier partners happy, so they give them control over things that will have an impact on cellular data.

Like I noted with FaceTime over cellular, it's nothing new.

I can't imagine what kind of leverage they think they have. is any provider going to just drop iPhone support from their network?

These deals are old. FaceTime when it came out was in the era of 3G. FaceTime over 3G could be a bandwidth hog.. and iPhones were not nearly as popular, so the negotiations were more give-and-take.

There are legitimate reasons why a specific business network might not allow it. For example, if you're on the employee network of a bank or hospital, it's very likely that your web connections are going through a proxy to make sure you're not sharing confidential data, and to block malware and such. Private Relay would go around those proxies. Allowing networks to opt out of Private Relay, then, is a better business decision than having enterprise networks just block all iPhones.

Corporate networks makes sense, but giving carriers the ability to disable it on the phone (i.e. not via blocking mask.icloud.com) doesn’t make sense. It’s not like personal hotspot where it allows you to bypass network policies, except for maybe the streaming shaping (but how long did they think that would work anyway?).

If I had to speculate, in order to continue operating in regions where governments more tightly control carriers.

From my limited testing, carriers are whitelisting traffic for high-bandwidth. When I establish a vpn tunnel on my Tmobile sim card, bandwidth drops dramatically. Presumably because they can't inspect it.

FWIW I am using Deadpool Telephony LLC, which uses the T-Mobile network (as MVNO), and Private Relay works fine.

iPhones sold in the UAE have FaceTime removed.

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