Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA
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The fuck is this shit? I need to root my phone if my phone company says I'm not allowed to tether? Why the fuck did google implement a feature that only serves to shaft their users? FUCK
https://www.howtogeek.com/263785/how-to-use-androids-built-in-tethering-when-your-carrier-blocks-it/
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@bb36e this is not a new thing. Lots of carriers charge extra for tethering.
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@Polygeekery honestly I might just get a non-tethering plan and then root my phone to enable tethering just out of spite
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@bb36e Just Fuckin Do It™
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Be warned, sometimes they also analyze user agent and TTL.
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@swayde I remember reading a forum thread somewhere where you could easily bypass the restriction by changing your TTL from whatever the default one that Android uses to another one
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@bb36e Wouldn’t it be the default that your computer uses to the Android default one?
Is there a way to disable HTTP in Chrome? Going all-HTTPS would solve the user agent snooping.
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@bb36e it looks to me like the US is the most barbaric country ever when it comes to consumer broadband.
Pay extra for tethering? Really, what the fuck, given that I pay for my traffic anyway?
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@wft said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Pay extra for tethering? Really, what the fuck, given that I pay for my traffic anyway?
Yeah, we've been saying the same thing for years. Thankfully I'm on a carrier and plan where they don't care and my phone wasn't bought from a carrier, so no lockout.
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@bb36e welcome to 2003?I think?
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@Tsaukpaetra welcome to 2018
sincerely, the rest of the world
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@Tsaukpaetra Like a lot of other things,
gougingis a decade ahead or so in the US. Although I hear in Japan...
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My least favorite thing in the world is when someone charges you for a bonus feature in the software they've already sent you. Such as YouTube Red being necessary to play YouTube videos when the screen is off, or a bonus charge for tethering/hotspot (a hardware capability).
There's an app, FoxFi, that lets you bypass that without root.
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@pie_flavor Yeah I can't not initially confuse YouTube Red with RedTube, they really fucked up there.
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@Gribnit said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@pie_flavor Yeah I can't not initially confuse YouTube Red with RedTube, they really fucked up there.
That may be why it's called YouTube Premium now.
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@heterodox hope they also renamed the binaries
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@bb36e said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@Tsaukpaetra welcome to 2018
sincerely, the rest of the world
Thanks,
the!
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@Gribnit said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@heterodox hope they also renamed the binaries
Maybe.
Filed under wonders if the Play Store is still called
phonesky...
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Why though? Tethering or not the amount of data used by the consumer is going to be the same. Why is it not allowed? I don't get it.
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@stillwater Because they can charge you extra for it, obviously.
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@stillwater said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Why though? Tethering or not the amount of data used by the consumer is going to be the same. Why is it not allowed? I don't get it.
Because back in the featurephone days, they charged for it. US carriers never really did get over smartphones not being feature phones.
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So you have to pay for something that does not cost the carrier anything extra? That is fucking robbery.
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That's a longstanding tradition for telecommunication companies.
Remember the cost per kilobyte they used to charge for SMS (a service that's basically piggy-backing on otherwise wasted bandwidth), or how they deliberately removed FM radio reception features on American phones to make you use Internet streaming instead (which they could charge for, unlike FM reception).
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@wft said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@bb36e it looks to me like the US is the most barbaric country ever when it comes to consumer broadband.
Pay extra for tethering? Really, what the fuck, given that I pay for my traffic anyway?
Wait until you hear about data limits on fiber connection...
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@Zerosquare said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Remember the cost per kilobyte they used to charge for SMS (a service that's basically piggy-backing on otherwise wasted bandwidth)
Wait what? I could understand charging per message, but per kilobyte? How does that even work when all messages are up to 160 bytes (without overhead)?
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@Gąska It could be MMS he's talking about, I guess?
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@Gąska Pretty sure he's conflating charging for SMS messages with charging for data by the kilobyte (and shipping all phones with a big fucking web browser button prominent on the keypad that launches straight into a quite large homepage, regardless of whether your plan includes data or not)
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@Gąska said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@Zerosquare said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Remember the cost per kilobyte they used to charge for SMS (a service that's basically piggy-backing on otherwise wasted bandwidth)
Wait what? I could understand charging per message, but per kilobyte? How does that even work when all messages are up to 160 bytes (without overhead)?
Multipart SMS and MMS messages were part of that. The other part was probably "X per kilobyte per message, minimum 1". A lot of US carriers used to sell their plans based on the number of voice minutes and free SMS messages included. "Unlimited texting" was a huge thing here for a while, since the carriers used to absolutely gouge on texting for the longest time.
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@e4tmyl33t same in Poland. The only thing different is that SMS were never quantified in kilobytes, always in messages. Multi-part SMS was charged like multiple SMS. Also, the smallest data usage unit is 100kB.
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@Gąska said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@e4tmyl33t same in Poland. The only thing different is that SMS were never quantified in kilobytes, always in messages. Multi-part SMS was charged like multiple SMS. Also, the smallest data usage unit is 100kB.
Yeah.... We had a thing called "WAP" that was kinda Internet but much cut down. I don't have any bills from that period, but I believe mine was in per-kilobyte measurements too.
But that was during a time when Google loaded in at perhaps 300 bytes on WAP...
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@Gąska said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Also, the smallest data usage unit is 100kB.
Speaking as someone who works with hardware designers, the smallest practical data usage unit is rather smaller than that. I was going to say “one bit” but there's all the transfer framing overhead to take into account at that level…
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@dkf smallest billable* data usage unit.
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@Gąska You gave the opening for
…Serious point: I wonder what the accounting unit on my phone is? I know that it's the same between what my phone thinks and what my carrier thinks (I've compared the aggregates towards the end of the billing-month and seen no significant variance) but I don't know what that actually is. Not that it matters. Much…
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@dkf said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@Gąska You gave the opening for
…Yeah, I forgot how keen people around here are on completely ignoring the context.
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@Gąska MIND READER ALIENS
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@Gąska said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Wait what? I could understand charging per message, but per kilobyte? How does that even work when all messages are up to 160 bytes (without overhead)?
For SMS, they did charge per message, not per kilobyte.
But if you computed the price per kilobyte (given that a single SMS is at most 160 bytes), you ended up with an exorbitant number, compared to the price per kilobyte of a voice call (which required transferring 3,250 bytes per second). It was even worse when you considered QoS (SMS are "best effort" with no delivery time guarantee, whereas voice calls need a constant-bandwidth and low-latency connection).
Of course they didn't stop there. I had forgotten about MMS pricing and the "let's put a shortcut to the WAP browser that's easily triggered by accident on the home screen" (which means you'll be paying an extra fee if your contract doesn't cover data usage), but they're pretty good examples of the kind of business practices telecom companies are known for.
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@Zerosquare said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Of course they didn't stop there. I had forgotten about MMS pricing and the "let's put a shortcut to the WAP browser that's easily triggered by accident on the home screen" (which means you'll be paying an extra fee if your contract doesn't cover data usage), but they're pretty good examples of the kind of business practices telecom companies are known for.
I know that feel. For the longest time, one of obligatory steps in my phone setup procedure was setting up invalid access points.
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That's the workaround I used to use, too.
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@stillwater This all depends on carrier, you realize. ATT allows tethering for free, has for about 10 years. (Before then there was a monthly charge to enable tethering.)
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@blakeyrat weirdly enough, their 'regular' unlimited prepaid plan doesn't allow tethering, but the 'premium' unlimited plan does (for $20/mo extra). Idk man
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@bb36e said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
I need to root my phone
If you aren't going to root your Android, you might as well just buy an iPhone.
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@gąska said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@dkf said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@Gąska You gave the opening for
…Yeah, I forgot how keen people around here are on completely ignoring the context.
With topic drift, which context?
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@Lorne-Kates said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@bb36e said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
I need to root my phone
If you aren't going to root your Android, you might as well just buy an iPhone.
Why's that?
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@blakeyrat said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@stillwater This all depends on carrier, you realize. ATT allows tethering for free, has for about 10 years. (Before then there was a monthly charge to enable tethering.)
Are you sure you're not on a grandfathered plan?
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@Gąska said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
Are you sure you're not on a grandfathered plan?
Pretty sure. I had the OG iPhone plan for ages (unlimited data for like $30 when they introduced the iPhone 3G) but then I combined accounts with an employer because they offered to pay my phone bills, then when they laid me off I tried to get back on my grandfathered plan and the guy was like "nope sorry, once it's off your account it's off forever" so now I'm on the like 2 GB plan.
I mean maybe it's some perk for being a customer of theirs for SO LONG, or they're simply unable to disable the feature since I didn't buy the phone through them, I dunno. All I know is all my phones for the last 10 years or so have been able to do tethering for free. (That iPhone, the android 2.2 phone I had after it, both my Windows Phones and now my Moto G5.)
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@blakeyrat said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
...or they're simply unable to disable the feature since I didn't buy the phone through them, I dunno.
Likely this. Many carrier phones over the years have had the tethering options blocked, hidden, or removed completely.
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@Parody with the caveat that original iPhones seem to detect if your plan allows tethering or not, and if not, they hide this menu option. You can see it live when swapping SIM card from one that supports it to one that doesn't.
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@pie_flavor said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@Lorne-Kates said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@bb36e said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
I need to root my phone
If you aren't going to root your Android, you might as well just buy an iPhone.
Why's that?
Because if you're going to not customize, and just accept the bullshit given to you-- then go with the product that has the nicer interface and support.
Rooted Android
>>iPhone>>non-rooted Android.
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@Gąska said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@Parody with the caveat that original iPhones seem to detect if your plan allows tethering or not, and if not, they hide this menu option. You can see it live when swapping SIM card from one that supports it to one that doesn't.
Yeah, I'm not surprised. Apparently it even extends to what apps appear in the app stores. Glad I've avoided that mess.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@pie_flavor said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@Lorne-Kates said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
@bb36e said in Telcos can disable mobile tethering in the USA:
I need to root my phone
If you aren't going to root your Android, you might as well just buy an iPhone.
Why's that?
Because if you're going to not customize, and just accept the bullshit given to you-- then go with the product that has the nicer interface and support.
Rooted Android
>>iPhone>>non-rooted Android.I'd rather go with the one that has better features, TYVM.
