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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I never saw that, then again we usually mostly buy Android phones pre-paid, free of any operator shenanigans.

It doesn't matter how your got your phone. Most Android phones will respect the result of the tethering entitlement check, which is returned by your carrier.

Still, never saw it on the European operators I have used thus far, or on any of my trips outside Europe, while using devices bought directly without any operator contract.

You can see this today with some eSIM providers. I’ve just travelled outside Europe one month ago and tethering could not be enabled until I changed to a different provider on an iPhone 15 without carrier contract.

eSIM is another way of providers to lock customers, working around lack of contracts, not something I ever plan to use as long as pre-paid SIM cards are a reality.

Thanks for pointing out that example.

I did some digging around in an old jailbroken iPhone (iOS 12) to try to figure out how to stop broadcast alerts from the cell towers and there is a database on the device itself with various parameters from cell carriers around the world. So there are least some settings that are “hard-coded” in each OS release which don’t have to be sent from the carrier - the iPhone will do X based on the SIM in the phone or the network it’s roaming on.

Not sure if tethering is one of the parameters , but there were quite a few.

Yes tethering is absolutely one of the parameters - including whether it’s enabled at all and whether it goes over its own separate APN (which is how the carrier can limit it or throttle it separately from the main data plan) or is sent in-band over the main APN used by the system (alongside other params like the number of client devices connected to the hotspot if I remember correctly). Android has a similar “carrier settings” database, although I haven’t looked too deep into what kind of settings are available.

I don't really know the full situation, but the intent was that your data plan has to include a "tethering" clause, and then your provider will unlock the tethering option on your phone.

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.

> I don't know, does apple ignore 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).

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