What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook? Data is data.
This is why we need net neutrality
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Net neutrality isn't going to do a thing about this kind of stuff. In a best case scenario, you'll end up with overall data usage limitations - no more 'unlimited mobile data'.
ISPs meter data usage because it's pretty much the only way they can impose some form of limitation on a finite capacity to provide such data to you and other customers - other than data rate limits (read: slower speeds). They can't guarantee data rates in almost any setup, because ultimately, while 'data usage' is a bit of an artificial construct and 'data' is not in any way finite, the pipes that deliver the data certainly are of finite capacity. Mobile data capacity - and in fact, any wireless medium - is a shared medium, the more people try to use it simultaneously, the less pleasant it's going to be for each individual user. Ask Starlink users in many US areas how overselling limited capacity impacts the individual user.
Mobile data usage also has different usage patterns than if you're hotspotting your PC. You're not going to download massive games or other bandwidth hogs to your mobile. You probably won't be running a torrent client either. So they can give you unlimited mobile data because you're simply not going to put as much of a strain on the infrastructure with pure on-device usage than you will with hotspotting.
This isn't a defense of what AT&T is doing. But net neutrality isn't going to force them to suddenly be all ethical. It's not going to make them provision infrastructure that doesn't fall over at the first signs of higher-than-usual load. And it certainly can't change the physical realities of wireless data communication. In an ideal world ISPs wouldn't be so greedy and/or beholden to greedy shareholders to be cutting corners, and instead provide sufficient infrastructure that can handle high demand.
And to those who are talking about their workarounds: you may not like it but you've signed a contract. That contract stipulates acceptable use, and if you're found to be breaching the contract terms, the other party is within their rights to terminate the contract. Again, in an ideal world these contract terms would be more balanced towards the needs of the customer, but in the meantime your best recourse against unfavourable contract terms is to take your business elsewhere. And if you can't do that, everything else is at your own risk.
If they didn't have the bandwidth, I don't think T-Mobile would offer home Internet and advertise it as much as they do
But where are they offering it? Big cities and densely populated areas where people have options and therefore won't swarm to the product? Or are they offering it in small, remote towns where there's not a lot of competition?
Where I live, mobile home internet is not available outside of metro areas and larger cities, and in the regions mobile towers are chronically underprovisioned and overloaded.
Sorry how would net neutrality do anything but make them reword the policy??
The ISP shouldn't care what kind of traffic is going through the network and show it down by type. It should be neutral to it
Some or all major mobile providers outright BAN hotspots in their ToS. However, they don't enforce the rule as it would be very unpopular.
And we still have pretty much the most expensive cellular data in the EU. The triopoly sucks.
Data is data in the same way water is water and electricity is electricity; nobody should have the power to dictate how you use it. I really wish we’d enshrine genuine net neutrality and shut this kind of nonsense down.
Except there is no 'unlimited' for water or electricity.
How do they know if the source of data is hotspot? I'd imagine there is a way to stop your phone grassing on you.
There's different internal network configs (APNs), and hotspot uses a different one than regular mobile data. ( or at least it used to). Those can be configured and metered separately from the carrier's end.
LineageOS, and maybe some other custom ROMs, wouldn't do that and would put the hotspot and mobile data on the same APN to get around that.
Can confirm, switching to Graphene solved this problem for me a long while ago.
Doesn’t unlocking the bootloader break Google Pay?
You can lock the bootloader again after the flashing process is done(because it will add the signing key of the new OS), but unfortunately the NFC Payments in Google Pay still won't work because Google only allows it on 'certified' Android systems (aka only the preinstalled OS)
Isn't this dependent on the ROM, like lineage shouldn't be locked where as calyx is locked likewise for graphine os
Yes, afaik LineageOS shouldn't be locked, but I was talking about GrapheneOS specifically because @wesker@lemmy.sdf.org was talking about that.
Try plugging your phone on via the USB instead of a WiFi hotspot. It may not detect it as a hotspot.
Doesn't matter, it still gets flagged as hotspot traffic.
I wonder if a VPN would make any difference? I have tasker set up to kick on wireguard any time I leave my wifi network. They'd only see my WG port.
It hasn’t made a difference for me, I’m on Verizon if that matters. I’ve got Wireguard set to always on and all traffic but I still get the usage notifications. IIRC there’s a separate apn for any traffic that goes through the hotspot or tethering connection and that’s how it’s monitored. The traffic will be encrypted, but they can still see it.
I've had great success getting around these restrictions.
CalyxOS + Always on VPN (mullvad)
The secret sauce is using a Android version that allows you to share your VPN with hotspotting. I believe only calyxos and lineage allow you to do this. Since the VPN client is running on the phone, all the traffic that originates from the phone will look like phone data, with the appropriate time to live, OS fingerprinting, etc.
This can't be done on stock Android, because it does not allow the VPN to be shared over tethering. So tethering traffic will not getting capsulated on the VPN client. There's a security argument for this, but I prefer the user flexibility of allowing all the traffic to get VPNed.
It's still possible to do this without VPN sharing on the phone, you can use normal tethering on a unlocked phone, like stock Android. You just have to modify the traffic signature to look like whatever the carrier is looking for. Setting the appropriate time to live, using a VPN, and doing other OS fingerprinting tricks to keep the traffic consistent. It's much easier to use a ROM that lets you share the VPN
Great tip.
Time to live (TTL) or hop limit is a mechanism which limits the lifespan or lifetime of data in a computer or network. TTL may be implemented as a counter or timestamp attached to or embedded in the data. Once the prescribed event count or timespan has elapsed, data is discarded or revalidated. In computer networking, TTL prevents a data packet from circulating indefinitely. In computing applications, TTL is commonly used to improve the performance and manage the caching of data.
Hmm kinda makes sense
I had a provider before that blocked tethering and hotspot, the solution there was also to increase TTL on the clients connecting to the phone by 1. The phone would lower it by 1 again, making it look like data originated from there.