Smartphone Tethering: A Bigger Grind Than It Needed to Be
tedium.co
tedium.co
So just on principle alone I refuse to pay the tethering tax and tether using terminux and ssh. the usability sucks in comparison to the built in method but at least I get to control my packets.
Not sure if tethering is one of the parameters , but there were quite a few.
Thanks for pointing out that example.
Data plans may automatically include this clause, mine didn't, liberated ASOP rightfully ignores it, pureOS ignores it, apple... I don't know, does apple ignore it? but the stock pixel image honored it.
No, it doesn't. I know because I had issues once enabling it and Apple customer support asked me to talk to my carrier if tethering was enabled for me. I was irritated when I heard this as I thought they are just "passing the buck" to someone else, and unnecessarily became rude and told them that indian carriers don't have such nonsense and stop bringing US practices to India. (Turns out they were partially right - you had to add a carrier specific username in the APN settings, as Apple didn't have it in its carrier database).
I remember when ringtones could only be downloaded from the cellphone company.
there were workarounds, but it was hard.
then apple fixed all that.
And now apple has "fixed" all their UIs so for practical purposes, people are back to buying their ringtones (from apple now).
there are workarounds, but it is hard.
Market had fixed that many years before iphone existed
These carrier profiles are preloaded with the OS (and updates are downloaded on-demand based on SIM ICCID and MCC/MNC) and even apply to phones purchased outright directly from Apple, and used as an anti-competitive way to control access to certain features such as visual voicemail, calls/SMS on Mac (if the carrier profile allows it, your Mac will connect directly to the carrier’s IMS server just like a WiFi-calling client and be able to make calls without having your iPhone nearby) or cellular Apple Watch provisioning. The necessary APIs, docs and access is conditional on signing an agreement with Apple including an NDA.
All cellular customers are not created equal. If a cell phone company sold a $50 unlimited plan and the person used it to host a video streaming business with some rackmount servers in their closet, that user wouldn't really be the same as selling a $50 unlimited plan to someone who just wants to scroll TikTok for a few hours a day.
The other factor at play here is that consumers really hate tracking data usage and it's a horrible user experience. Nobody really understands what a gigabyte is and how to control usage on their phone.
So really, cellular companies need to sell plan tiers based on usage patterns. Basically, they have Grandma who doesn't give a flying fuck about how nice their YouTube looks, the phone addict who needs lots of streaming video and TikTok, and then you've got the road warrior business person who needs to hop on their computer and do some serious work.
In other words, they need to sell the exact same product with very similar usage terms to completely different users who have massive differences in usage patterns between them.
And let's be real here, we know that someone with a laptop can push more data than someone with a phone. The workflows are different. Nobody's downloading ISOs on their cell phone.
Remember that bandwidth is what cloud providers like AWS charge for. They can do that because their customers are highly technical and can understand those charges. But that business model just won't work for Joe Public on cellular networks.
That's something they could be clear about. Instead, it tends to be buried at the bottom of a bunch of obtuse "It's unlimited, for specific values of unlimited, and here are 82 other aspects that aren't quota or bandwidth numbers that make comparison shopping difficult" statements.
The big 3 US carriers basically tell you that data used by the phone is unlimited with no significant throttling, and that tethering is a separate data quota with more significant throttling after your allowance.
The reason this matters is that the aggregate sum of their customers aren’t realistically able to burn so much bandwidth on their smartphones that it causes issues, but someone using a tether could literally run all their home internet including hundreds of gigabytes of streaming TV that is never shut off off of a phone plugged into the wall and used as a router.
But the phone company also doesn’t really want to make customers on actual smartphones have to think about data allowance on their unlimited plans. They would rather base plan tiers off of things like video download quality which are drivers of bandwidth usage and are easier to understand to the layperson.
It’s could be an analogy to the same reason your car insurance company doesn’t want to insure your car if you’re using it for business purposes, because they know the costs and risks for someone using a vehicle for business are different than someone using a car for personal use, just the same way that someone using a phone to tether to a laptop is inevitably going to have a different usage pattern than someone with a smartphone in their pocket.
AT&T definitely throttles you (and sends threatening messages) if (for example) you get a new iPhone and your apps and music library start syncing to it (as they might.)
Note by default apps over 200MB aren't downloaded over cellular, but if you have a lot of ~200MB apps that can still add up quickly...
I miss the days when you could actually back up your apps (as well as their data) to local storage. I still have copies of apps (most of which paid Apple money for) which have been removed from the app store, or no longer work on current iOS. ;-(
The article doesn't quite mention it but back then the other option to get internet on a laptop was a dedicated USB dongle modem or Wifi hub thing.
Probably the next 'oh that's neat' moment happened a decade later when usb-c tethering became enabled such that one could tether a whole ethernet network of things to a phone if needed on occasion (e.g. broadband outages, moving to a new home)
Now get off my lawn you young whippersnappers.
Before USB, things that made a smartphone smart were its ability to get your laptop (or desktop) on the internet, anywhere that you had cell service. No differently than from a land line (except the land line did not charge by the minute unless it was long-distance). This is when you were paying for cellular voice service by the minute, with a certain number of free minutes included each month by this time. Dial-up ISP was on similar terms from a different provider like AOL, "always on" broadband was not very familiar yet and people were still accustomed to internet "sessions" where you log off as soon as you are finished.
With cellphones and ISPs most people were still acting like every session should be limited or it could end up running their minutes over, and for the relatively few who wanted portable internet it had always been double minutes (well from two providers) in cost so the airwaves were not filled with any significant data minutes compared to voice. If it could wait people would do it on a land line, even long conversations.
Oh, yeah, the cellphone itself was "on the internet" but about all it would do is email. Without a camera, color screen or very much of a keyboard the idea was to connect to a laptop if you needed portable internet.
Which is why the phones eventually had a free software suite from the manufacturer which included the PC drivers for its cellular modem so you could dial-up to places like AOL. It was a virtual COM port which the PC could address like it was internal hardware, dial out to any ISP you had an account with, and the modem naturally communicated with the answering party over regular phone lines like it was supposed to do. Once AT&T itself started offering broadband, they also had toll-free phone numbers posted for account holders to use when they were not at their home router. You could dial up from any land line or smartphone.
There was also a driver for the phone's virtual ethernet adapter if you wanted to use that, your phone would have an IP address. This is not the phone connecting by wifi, that came later.
It was the PC software that made smartphones smart, along with removable storage, and USB networking when it came along.
The early Motorola and Sony-Ericsson phones had infrared COM ports, to communicate with the early business laptops which had physical IR COM ports. Laptops were not yet affordable for very many students at all. IOW using Windows 98 over IR all you needed was the same built-in Windows apps to dial-up and log in to your ISP of choice, or alternatively autodial a fax machine and use Windows Faxing to send or receive a document straight from a file, with no paper involved at your end. Office 97 was not even necessary. Remember faxing was well established way before the internet got popular.
The virtual COM ports over USB or Bluetooth came later but served the same purpose.
After IR ports were long gone, the most common approach was using the USB cable but nobody called it "tethering" (that would have to wait until a different paradigm could be adopted and it could be billed for in an ongoing way). The USB cables were proprietary at one end and did cost about $30 extra so it was definitely not as popular as it could have been.
Sure enough, one day somebody decided they would get more cellphone customers if they had "unlimited minutes". And also, cellular carriers gradually became ISPs themselves.
But that basically meant that smartphone customers could have "always on" internet for the first time in history, even though it was not widely recognized.
Over about a year period the carriers disavowed all knowledge of specialized USB communication cables. This was still before the iPhone but I could tell things were going downhill, and wanted to get some spare Sony cables before my phone was discontinued and replaced by a less capable but more expensive unit. In the retail stores you could tell they were operating from a script when they said they had never had factory USB cords, and it was the same stores where they had been in stock in earlier years.
They did usher in a new generation of phones, a few of which would eventually communicate over generic USB cords. If you had a data plan, which would be charged extra, and there was no more factory cellphone software.
The carrier handled it all, that's when they started calling it "tethering", always meaning that there's "supposed to be" an upcharge, and acting like it's a new feature with never-before-seen convenience.
Fortunately the gigabytes have gotten liberal and it has gotten pretty convenient to enable tethering on Android, then connect any PC by USB or Bluetooth and be online.
As the article says, "it was pretty messy for a while there, and it had nothing to do with the devices. It was basically the providers getting in the way."
Those were the only other options from the carriers; lots of phones supported the bluetooth DUN profile and so forth, which carriers would disable. So the alternative was to buy an unlocked phone elsewhere and activate it. This was essentially impossible on Sprint and Verizon but AT&T and T-Mobile could pull it off -- and T-Mobile's frequencies overlapped those used my many European carriers, so the best bet was to buy a Nokia from the UK or such and activate it with a T-Mobile sim back in America.
There was also JoikuSpot for some of the Nokia devices.
This year due to various circumstances, I was going to start using it 24/7. I did not, however, because:
T-Mobile seems to have an actual, usable and affordable plan. $50/month, but they don't offer it in my area.
Verizon offers 5G home internet and it's only $35/month (I'm already a verizon wireless customer). It's available in my area, but there aren't any slots actually open for it. Their traditional 'Jetpack' options are $100/150GB of data. And using your phone as a hotspot only gives you 60GB of premium data and then you're rate limitied.
ATT offers Internet Air, but they don't have any information on usage other than "In rare cases, if your usage is contributing to congestion on the network, AT&T will greatly reduce your speed for a min. of 30 min". Previously, their product wasn't offered at my address, and they also had disclaimers about not using it for media consumption or commercial use. They also allow 60GB of smartphone tethering and then throttled to 128kbs.
> Unlimited Plus plans allow up to 50 GB of full-speed data.
> any data used after you reach your data limit is throttled or slowed to 256 kbps
"You can pay a flat rate for unlimited use, but after you use 3,000L of water, we will reduce service to your house to 1/10th the normal pressure"
It's fine, you just have to wait 40 minutes between flushes.
Many MVNOs have "unlimited" plans that are definitely not unlimited. If a plan offers 50GB of high-speed data and then throttles the connection to 256kbps, it's a 50GB plan. By contrast, a plan like T-Mobile's Go 5G Plus/Next plans never slow your mobile data.
Other plans like T-Mobile's Go 5G (regular) will be lower priority once you've used 100GB. That lower priority averages 11-15% slower. Most of the time, the network isn't congested and it doesn't matter. You get virtually the same speed as truly unlimited plans. 11-15% slower isn't the same as getting throttled to 256kbps. Of course, it will depend on network conditions. If you're at a fireworks show or a music festival, lower priority might be a lot slower.
There are options if you want truly unlimited mobile data. If you're looking for hotspot, that's harder. T-Mobile does offer its Away Unlimited plan for $160/mo, but that is lower priority - 13-30% slower at the 25th and 75th percentiles. 77-292 Mbps from the 25th to 75th percentiles is pretty decent performance, but if you end up in an area with lots of network congestion, then you're low priority.
I get 50GB of data at a higher priority, and then unlimited data at a lower priority. It's not a deliberate or fixed speed limit -- it's just QoS, and after 50GB it's the same QoS as their lower-tier $25 plan always has.
On both sides of the QoS fence, loosely speaking: If the network is congested in an area, things get slow. If the network has good coverage and is not congested, then things are fast enough -- dozens of Mbps in both directions is typical with my old phone's somewhat-limited available 5G NSA or LTE CA modes. (Sometimes, it's triple-digit Mbps, which amusing and frankly overkill for my use.)
With TTL=65, this works fine for me in my neck of the woods. I need tethering when I need it, though I don't need it often. But in some circumstances (some friends and I do a technology-laden form of "camping" sometimes and one of my roles there is to provide Internet) I burn through quite a lot of data.
[1]: Visible is a part of Verizon, and has always been. The chief difference other than different pricing is that it comes with even worse customer support, if you can believe that.
The mobile data isn't limited in speed, just lower priority as you note.
The fact that Visible/Verizon can even get my (unlocked, full price) iPhone to cooperate in limiting itself in that way in the first place makes me pretty sad.
Eg, if one were to buy a new phone and put a new Visible SIM into that phone and tether their new MacBook with it, and do nothing else, the speed would indeed be limited and this limit would be enforced at the carrier level, and furthermore connecting a second device would be theoretically impossible.
But setting TTL to 65 has been very effective every time I've done it, whereby: The speed of tethering is about the same as the speed of data on the pocket computer itself at any given time.
And I've never actually run into a device limit, even without tricks.
(So yeah, there's reasons for my camping rig to have a USB 3 ethernet adapter for a phone, with USB PD passthrough. I wouldn't care so much if 10Mbps were all that could be accomplished, but things are not necessarily slow like that at all if you're holding it right.
There's a million other ways to skin this cat. A cheap travel router is one way. A cheap USB WiFi adapter on a laptop is another. Setting TTL forever is a one-liner on Windows. And y'all know how to do NAT.)
As far as I remember, a full screen JPEG (320x320 pixel) would have been thousands of messages according to the UI.
Having a phone plan where each text was dozens of cents, that UI scared me a lot.
I ultimately determined that if I wanted to spend more money for better internet then shotgunned 56K was the next step up, not satellite.
Easytether was infinitely easier and worth every penny. I love that they sell it straight off their website rather than making people buy via the play store.
(I paid for it on three phones. Had it been play store only, I would have pirated it each time.)
I have 2GB (for an insane $145ish/mo) CenturyLink fiber and it's been horrible for the last 3-4 months.
With that said, in my city subreddit we have a thread about how there are certain intersections/blocks that will kill your Apple Carplay while driving until you've exited the area. Th e running theory is there's a big telecom company or a defense contractor right there doing something weird.
Why though? Are talking about bad Wi-Fi experience or you are not getting good speed even while connected through Ethernet. My friends with CenturyLinks have no complains.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/1fbjx1y/centurylink... ing_issues/
I'm not referring to wifi at all. This is my fiber connection. I have a million devices, half of which aren't wifi.
I can barely run 2-3 youtube videos at 1080p - 4k each at a time right now. If my bedroom TV is playing a 1080p my desktop on ethernet may (not always) drop to auto-360p, etc.
I used to never have to think about changing my youtube video quality up higher and off auto until this year IIRC. I'm constantly changing youtube quality now or have TVs that will buffer forever if a video is playing elsewhere.
On my 2GB..
The positive of CL is their Outage detector is very accurate, I guess they probably get a lot of practice.
I’ll just go quit my day job now
Only hairy part is configuring proxy servers on Windows. For some stupid reason, a proxy configuration script must be served from a website and not a local file. So you need to install a localhost webserver just to serve the proxy configuration script.
Fun side effects: Apps on your phone which, when you're on wi-fi, can connect to other apps on the same wi-fi, can't.
Terrible performance getting to streaming services, when apps running on the device itself talk to them fine.
Who knew?
Yes, I know about (and sometimes use) the ttl=65 loophole, but I'd like to see a major carrier launch a truly unlimited plan.
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=65
When done, switch it back:
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=64
I went from 0.3Mbps on T-Mobile to 50+ Mbps with this; on providers that limit hotspot speed by examining TTL, this can be an effective way to get around it.
(They assume if they see TTL as one lower than expected, data is passing through a hotspot/phone instead of directly from the phone.)
sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_default_ttl=65
I assume there is an ipv6 version as well, but I haven't needed it.
You can still workaround by creating a Routine to turn it on, it it was infuriating to run into. Makes me want to go back to running custom roms, but Android SafetyNet keeps making that less and less feasible.
I'm switching carriers, since it seems like writing is on the wall for this important capability for me.