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Comment by notjulianjaynes | Hacker News Reader

Like 5 years ago I paid $10 for an app called easytether. Drivers for Windows, Mac, Linux you install these and app on your phone. It tunnels all computer traffic through your phone's browser so no tethering fees or data caps if you have unlimited phone data. Very simple and when I lived in a rural area it was the choice between that and the hilariously slow/overpriced satalite internet (this was pre starlink).

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Or you could have done the same for free by setting the packet TTL on all client devices to 65. Carriers check if a device is using hotspot by looking at packet TTLs. Anything coming from your phone directly has a TTL of 64, but anything connected via hotspot loses one TTL hopping through your phone, so it comes through as 63 (or 127 for Windows devices). Overriding your client TTL to 65 means that carriers will receive the packet with a TTL of 64.

It can't be that simple? Doesn't the phone switch APN's when tethering is active? Or bridge the hotspot to a different APN?

It is that simple. I have successfully used this to continue using hotspot after exceeding my monthly allowance as recently as a few months ago.

Yeah that's probably how it works, except I don't know how to actually implement all of that myself, and it was a one time payment for use on all my devices. The only downside is connection is through usb or bluetooth. If you are aware of a way to put my un-rootable phone in hotspot mode that sidesteps the up-charge, please advise. When I had a pixel with Graphene installed this was possible.

I got (unauthorized) tethering to work on a few phones.

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.)

Those pre-starlink satellite internet setups were horrible. I remember using a bandwidth calculator to determine I could download about the same per month off my 56K modem as the monthly data cap. Sure, it sucked for burst downloads but the 56K was way cheaper and had much better latency as well (Hughesnet type setups had multiple second latency). It wasn't a great experience playing online games on 56K but with Hughesnet it was actually impossible.

I ultimately determined that if I wanted to spend more money for better internet then shotgunned 56K was the next step up, not satellite.

IIRC there were even some hacky tethering services that leveraged unlimited text messaging plans with a smartphone to some special server to facilitate internet.

I remember Palm OS being able to send and receive binary attachments via SMS (over Infrared or Bluetooth and an attached phone, I think). Not MMS, actually data SMS!

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.

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