Android

Must be a USA thing, never heard of such a thing.

I remember it definitely being a very common thing in USA a decade or so ago. I never knew it disappeared. I don't think it would ever fly in Europe.

Hotspot began as a paid feature. It only became free as carriers lost grip on the devices on their network.

That is outrageous. US telecom companies need to be nationalized or burned down.

I've heard about this happening and I couldn't believe it.

I don't even understand this from a networking perspective.. Your phone just becomes a router, forwarding requests, so from the ISP perspective it's still the same?

How do they even know?

Sounds like a murica problem. Maybe you're getting too much freedom already?

Certified USA moment

https://github.com/pyamsoft/tetherfi

Is this an American thing I'm too European to understand.

Are you really paying to just activate wifi hotspot? How is thst justifiable by any means?

Your problem seems to be that you are residing in the U.S

This is one reason why I will never pay for a phone I cannot root if a rootable option exists.

Strangers on the internet constantly tell me I am a fool to root "'cause security", and I just shake my head.

If I pay $700 for a phone, I own it. If I'm paying for X gigabytes of cellular data, I will not be told I cannot use it "for that".

I almost never see advertisements, am blocking tracking and malware at the device level, and impriving sound output quality. I use kernels that are patched up way better than the device default, and have superior battery life, and cpy over-clocking.

I'd go insane if I had to deal with all those restrictions, invasion of privacy, and monetization of my life at my expense.

Just because most people don't seem to know this: Comcast's wifi service Xfinity is actually mostly fed by the routers Comcast cable customers have in their homes. So as a cable customer, you're paying the electric bill and giving up part of your bandwidth to support Xfinity.

Laughs in European

I've never had to pay extra for hotspot usage even though all of the phones I've had were bought directly from the service provider.

In America, some carriers disable hotspot on the devices they sell and hold you hostage. There are many ways around this. The best way is to use OEM non carrier phones. Other options include pdanet and several other apps designed to bypass the carrier software locks. My graphene os hotspot works perfectly no matter what carrier I use

Edit: Oh, and you can forget it on iphones. Apple loves sucking carriers dicks and fucking you all over. They go out of their way to ensure the carriers are robbing you before allowing hotspot use

I don't think that's a thing in Europe.

Because the Republican party wants it this way. They've burned down net neutrality at every possible opportunity because it doesn't affect them; they barely understand how to send an email, much less connect a device to Wi-Fi without calling their offspring to do it for them.

Definitely sounds like a USA specific issue. In Australia we pay for GBs data, it's up to us what we use it on. I'd be appalled if they tried to pull that bullshit here.

Most carriers include 'unlimited' data, usually broken up in XXXGb at full speed, then unlimited data at much lower speeds.

Isn't a hotspot a hardware feature?

What is this comment section going on about it being a paid feature originally? How did people pay for software restricted hardware?!

You have to pay for your hotspot?

The "pay for mobile hotspot" is more of a carrier thing than an Android thing. iPhone users suffer as well.

On Android you can at least use apps like SecureTether. It's a bit clunky, but it works on my Pixel 6a.

What I don't appreciate is Google completely turning off the ability to create a hotspot WiFi network even if your mobile data is off. In college we would connect multiple laptops to a phone hotspot and play LAN games.

It started when unlimited plans first became a thing. Prior to that, you paid for a specific amount of data up to a cap, then paid a premium if you went over, so they didn't care how you used it. When US companies first started offering unlimited plans, they excluded teathering, or added an extra charge for it, because you can use so much more data that way. Many companies have dropped that - I know my Verizon plan let's me teather - but some still have it.

When we lost the first fight for net neutrality.

What the fuck? Aussie here. Ive had a dozen phones, both locked to carrier and unlocked, and never been unable to turn on hotspot. Thats madness.

Not one mention in this thread of Net Neutrality. How quick we are to forget.

I haven't renewed my student unlimited data plan since 2011. It lasted through a company merger and a pandemic. I'm never renewing my plan. My first born will inherit this plan when I die.

Since fucking always, at least with my phone on AT&T

my pixel 7 with grapheneOS let's me use a hotspot and USB tether. the USB teathering is way faster I've found. I don't pay for teathering and I quit getting my phones through the carrier just because they lock them down and put a bunch of crapware/Spyware on them. You remove it and it magically reappears, they get paid to put these dumb apps on the phone. Just feels like when you buy the phone through the carrier you don't own it.

Where are you?

In Canada I've never heard this being charged for

The day (North) American people realize: they live just to feed corporations' greed, lobbying is just legal bribery, their government doesn't give a flying fuck about them, most developed countries' offering and protection is miles further away from what they have... they won't do shit. Because the system works as it's intended to. Maybe ask to bring American freedom to America? 🦅 🇺🇸

It was always an extra paid option for me back in the day. Had to jailbreak the phone to use it. These days it's just available now for free.

How do they detect that you are using a hotspot? Isn't the phone using NAT internally? Like, with NAT they don't know whether a request comes from your phone or from the hotspot

Not a problem in western Europe.

It has been like that from the beginning. If you're root your phone you can do it for free usually.