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Comment by NotPractical | Hacker News Reader

Kind of absurd that your OS (which is supposed to always be acting in your best interest) enforces these arbitrary carrier data limits -- it's objectively anti-user behavior and wouldn't exist if Android were truly FOSS (emphasis on "free").

This solution is great for permanently bootloader-locked phones (which is unfortunately, most phones).

Alternatively, if installing a custom OS is an option, most Android forks remove the tethering restrictions. I use and highly recommend GrapheneOS [1] if you have a supported phone (Pixels only as of now). DivestOS and LineageOS have much wider device support. ProtonAOSP and CalyxOS are other options for Pixels and a few others.

[1] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/70

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Tethering is mostly a relic of the late 2000's when 3G cellular networks were pretty sketchy; if enough people tethered back then it'd put a huge strain on the network for anyone on that tower. Nowadays the capacity is already planned out with tethering in mind (all tier A plans, eg. direct-from-carrier plans, have some amount of tethering), but it gets pretty murky when you consider people trying to tether on their MVNOs network at peak times/rush hour, really straining the capacity allocated to that MVNO, degrading the service for others.

Even with large accounts the carriers still impose limits on tethering. If you’re getting unlimited tethering, it’s probably actually a “pool” of data.”

Even there, there’s some differences as prioritization works differently when you are using pool resources.

Really?, Which country are you talking about? Here is Australia, I can tether with Aldi Mobile, a reseller of the Telstra mobile network. Works fine in Android and iPhone.

The US.

Tethered traffic is usually routed differently. Almost all cellular data traffic is CGNATed or proxied, and different priority is assigned to different types of traffic.

For 95% of users, there’s no problem at all. When people push the limits, they find themselves in a pickle. I’m familiar with an organization with >50k devices across 4 major carriers 4-5 years ago. They probably had <500 people who required some sort of exception, ranging from a different plan to a more appropriate device and plan, to someone doing something crazy. (One guy was running a small field office off of a Samsung tablet)

To be fair Android as in ASOP is truly FOSS but because all drivers are baked into the kernel for reasons better lost to the sands of time, Vendor/Carrier pairs can enforce what they like in their required custom builds. This is what Google's project Fushia was/is supposed to solve.

Not since Project Treble they're not.

The more pressing issue is that bootloader unlocking isn't as ubiquitous as one might like.

It could also be said that being able to re-lock after cooking your ROM is just as important and even more missing

This isn't anti-user behavior. It's anti-asshole behavior. There are plenty of plans designed for tethering if you care to purchase them.

Tethering on a plan that doesn't allow it is like showing up at an all-you-can-eat buffet and leaving with a backpack full of food.

You are paying for a mobile data connection, what does it matter how the bandwidth is consumed?

If your use affects everyone else in the area, it matters. It's like having a bonfire in California in fire season; sure, it's your property, and your firewood, but you can't pretend it can't possibly affect someone else's enjoyment of theirs.

There is a limited amount of throughput a tower can handle, both on its backhaul and antennas. Depending on what you're doing over that tethered connection, you might be using up 2x-10x the throughput they provisioned for "you"; if enough people tether at once during rush hour, there's going to be a significant drop in speeds for both you and people just trying to use their phones normally.

This is why that, when phones tether, those tethered packets are routed separately so that the cell carrier can throttle them when needed to maintal quality of service for everyone else.

By tethering/tunneling through your normal connection, they can't do this, and if this became an epidemic they would either need to do thorough DPI and heuristics to detect and block the tethering/ban the user, or over-provision their towers to handle the varied traffic volumes of both regular cell phone activity and people watching 4k Netflix on their TV through their phone.

This is technically true, but the issue is that it essentially keeps us form progressing technologically. Therefore, it's fine to ignore their rules.

In general a few dozen or even thousand techies on HN doing this across the US isn't going to change anything, but it's obvious that we'd eventually have a huge problem if everyone moving into a new apartment or house decided to forego wired internet and instead stream exclusively over a hidden tether to their phone. This is why, when actual fully-supported home internet over 5g is available in an area[0,1], availability tends to be limited and people still sometimes get deprioritized.

0: https://www.t-mobile.com/home-internet

1: https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/

Fine.

launches bittorrent client on the phone

Somehow other countries make it work.

Because you’re not buying that. The use cases used to build the solution have to make assumptions. Microsoft Outlook uses exponentially more network resources to fetch and send email than a purpose designed mobile app, for example.

You can get plans that support tethering or mobile LANs - they aren’t even that expensive. Carriers will usually prioritize those connections lower than public safety or mobile phone connections to ensure better user experience. LTE and 5G fixed home plans are an easy example of this available to consumers.

If your business model isn't compatible with the freedom of your customers, you should generally find a new business model, rather than working to reduce that freedom.

See also: modern intellectual "property" laws & enforcement, the businesses that push for it (typically large companies with a wealth of IP), the organizations that facilitate the control of information (governments, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Netflix, etc.), and the business models that depend on it.

There are cases where the benefits are worth a reduction in freedom, but this ain't it.

I'd say it's more like showing up at an all-you-can-eat buffet and eating with a fork. It's not anything that one should be charged extra for. If the bandwidth is the issue, they can charge realistic prices for bandwidth.

Perhaps a better analogy is showing up to an all-you-can-eat buffet and grabbing 20 brownies to take home. Sure, it doesn't change much, but if everyone did that there'd be a problem and the service provider should probably police it.

No, that's a worse analogy. The issue is not with the amount consumed. We're well aware that there's no such thing as all-you-can-eat or "unlimited" anything. A Matt Stonie would be banned from any all-you-can-eat buffet.

What's egregious is ISPs also enforcing _how_ I'm allowed to consume the data I'm paying for. So the fork analogy is much more appropriate.

This analogy is no good. Plans have data limits. It is not an all-you-can-eat buffet. Tethering restrictions are an attempt to paywall features which the device can do without harming anyone else on the network.

A better analogy is a gas station which charges more for gas that goes into sports cars than gas that goes into minivans.

Yeah, they do. Big V8s usually require premium gas.

Premium gas costs more. Race cars need race gas — that costs even more.

Does the gas station check what car is pulling up, or do you choose based on what you think works best for the engine?

Depends on the business model. A New Jersey gas station will deny you the freedom of putting diesel in your Civic.

I agree with you that it's a bad analogy. But to be fair, all-you-can-eat buffets are not really all-you-can-eat, and will kick you out if you try to consume more than what they calculated a regular consumer does. All service providers do this when they falsely advertise "unlimited" anything.

Where ISPs cross the line is by trying to also enforce _how_ I can consume the data I'm paying for. Having plans that restrict tethering is consumer-hostile, plain and simple. Whether I'm tethering or not has no relation to how much data I consume. They can continue to restrict bandwidth and data limits if I go overboard, but I'll be damned if I allow them to tell me how I can use it.

So if we're going with the buffet analogy, then it's like them saying I can only use a fork to eat, as someone mentioned above.

No, it's like using my shower nozzle to fill up my bath tub because I didn't want to pay the water company an extra "soaking" fee.

More like being the dipshit who fills his pool with well water and dries out the neighborhood.

On that topic... US federal regulations[0] limit shower heads to a flow rate of 2.5 gallons per minute (GPM). And California[1] limits them to 1.8 GPM! This seems somewhat analogous to the mobile data discussion.

"You are paying for a water service, what does it matter how the water is consumed?" Though of course there are big differences. An obvious one is that water companies aren't profiting off these restrictions like mobile operators at least partially are. And since water is either heavily regulated by or entirely ran by governments, the cost to the consumer doesn't necessarily represent the true cost.

(The California restriction even seems reasonably well enforced. When buying a 2.5 GPM shower head on Amazon[2] you'll get an error if you try to ship it to a California address. Most eBay sellers enforce this as well, though not quite all of them.)

[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2020-27280/p-56

[1] https://www.build.com/ca-compliant/c133273#:~:text=Residenti...

[2] https://smile.amazon.com/showerhead-2.5GPM-that-wont-ship-to...

I'm paying for 25G of data a month. How I want to use it should be entirely up to me.

The cell network is property of the carrier. It’s in the user’s best interest that they have access to the cell network, which means playing by the carrier’s rules. The user is free to pick a different cell carrier or find a work around.

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