Android

This has been a thing the mobile carriers (AT&T in particular) have demanded of handset makers- that they give the carrier the ability to lock down the tether feature so they can sell an upcharge on your plan (or a piece of hotspot hardware they can charge you a whole separate line for) so that they can un-cripple it and pretend they didn't take that away to begin with. This ought to be regulated like the taking-away-of-the-feature-in-the-phone-you-paid-for that it is.

So I figured out a while ago there there's an app called PdaNet+ along with Foxfi. It let's you use your phones mobile connection instead of a hotspot to connect your external devices. It's worked wonders for me and although I haven't had to use it much due to unlimited data and access to wifi where I am, it's useful if you aren't in that situation. I believe the app key unlocker is about $8 but it's worth it for the features it offers.

When net neutrality was the law you could do that and the phone company couldn't charge you. The company branded phone could just not support it. Before that it was ridiculously expensive, and now it depends on the company. Most post paid plans take it out of your fast data with no extra fee.

Companies have been making the tether feature on phones throttle the data rates forever so this is unsurprising

Long time ago, but it’s entirely dependent upon carrier.

Mint for example doesn’t have an extra fee for hotspot. Mine didn’t work after setting up service and I had to chat them, but they fixed it and it works fine. Cricket didn’t charge for it for a long time, until they did, and I no longer use them as a result.

You just need to find a carrier that includes it for no fee. At least you can vote with your wallet on those things. And when they ask why you are canceling and porting your number, be honest it’s because of their hotspot policy, and other carriers don’t charge for it.

If your phone is unlocked then this feature is free already.

Yup, I can stream 1080p videos all day long on my phone, use tb of data, no issue from AT&T, no throttling, no overcharge. Switch on my Hotspot and go above 20gb on my laptop? That's a paddlin!

Fucking, greedy shitbags.

Since never, unless you live in the corporate hellscape - most sensible parts of the world have regulations about this, but I guess not being ripped off is un-american or something?

Did you get a "subsidized" phone?

If my carrier did this I would switch. Having a backup connection for outages at home has saved my butt multiple times.

AFAIK an unlocked phone can hotspot no matter what. My plan does not include mobile hotspot data and yet I use it all the time.

The US carriers have been fighting the battle for years between expanding the networks providing high speed data and competing with other carriers to provide it more cheaply.

If you're sitting on a plan that's 5 or 10 years old you could be sitting on a 30 or 60 gig plan where you can do whatever you want with those gigs.

Or you could be sitting on a brand new super cheap plan that blocks you from tethering altogether if they can.

Or you could be sitting on one of their top tier unlimited plans where you can tether up to 20 or 30 gig.

The numbers features and prices seem to change with the wind and they're not often in the mood to kick you out of your existing plans.

The carriers all have pretty bad capacity issues in urban and rural areas were they either have too many people or not enough towers per square mile. They're all trying to expand but every time you have a local power outage and everyone tries to use their cell phone at the same time nobody gets through anywhere for data.

If you have an Android download pdanet which lets you hotspot count as phone data. Also if you get a small hotspot but unlimited phone data you can turn it on and set the TTL or connecting devices to 65 (I think look it up) and it will think it's the phone connecting. Happy pirating

This is wild. I live in Ireland. For €12.99 a month, I get 200GBs of data, unlimited texts and calls to other mobile phones in Ireland.

I use my hotspot A LOT and have never paid extra for it lol. I can't imagine paying more for it.

What phone do you have? I've never heard of an android phone not having wifi Hotspot....

No clue if this will work for you or not, but there are a few things you might try.

1. Increase the TTL for packets on your computer from 64->65 or from 128->129. It makes it harder for them to tell that the traffic isn't coming to the phone.
2. If you can live with USB tethering and also do #1, I have had zero problems. And got much better speeds than with any hotspot.
3. If the OS is blocking this then... yeah sorry... join the Free World and get a custom ROM.

This is the reason I was forced to use android and root my phone. I used a custom ROM to bring back the tethering option then connect to a VPN and used the rooted terminal to mess with the iptables and routing to mask the fact I was tethering. Uuuugh, I don't miss those days. Luckily the market changed in my country and went the other direction so I don't have to deal with this anymore.. Still have the old shell scripts saved tho ;)

I have never even heard that was a thing. Wow.

I agree. Long ago, mobile Hotspot just came with my plans. Now it's extra, which is stupid. Just another way for them to make $$

Canadians might have some of the shittiest service and prices in the world, but at least we don't pay extra to hotspot?

Visible service has unlimited hotspot/tethering, however its throttled.

For a while I used it as my main internet connection by tethering it via USB to a router that spoofed the TTL packets, which bypassed the throttling.

If you're running Android you can use PDAnet to act as a mobile hotspot. You can connect your devices to your phone through wifi.

Edit: I didn't notice what community this was posted in. Obviously you're using Android 🤦

Since the beginning.

Mobile providers have always tried to charge for hotspot service. Since I started buying my own phones, not through the provider, I haven't had a problem with it turning on, and I haven't seen any additional charge for using it (just normal consumption of the data). I don't think that most providers can tell the difference in traffic natively from the device and from something on its hotspot, so restrictions are likely phone specific. If you have Android, install a custom ROM (I'd suggest anything AOSP), and for iPhone, IDK. Maybe do a complete reset to the official version from Apple (not the carrier specific version of the firmware).

Restoring your files and apps is the most difficult part of the process and generally takes a while (usually a few hours of setting up accounts on different apps, but it should kill off your carriers control of your device in regards to hotspot limits

I understand the frustration, 100% I do. I'm equally angry about the state of things, fact is, there are things you can do about it, like buying your devices unlocked, non-carrier specific from trusted endpoints. This is easy to do with Apple and Google, as they both allow end users to buy their products right from their website or in stores (if such stores exist). But other manufacturers will only sell to distributors, like your carrier, who screws with the firmware before you get your hands on the device. Avoiding such distributors is the key point here. Being unlocked doesn't mean much if you're still running the carriers firmware which disallows the feature unless you do something like pay them.

It's not a nice solution, since most people have, or are purchasing their devices through carrier contacts and discounts, and generally for untampered devices, you need to buy them all at once, up front. The only saving grace is that a lot of manufacturers are now putting the untampered version of the phone firmware online, and you can typically find a way to wipe the device completely and install the manufacturers untampered version with enough time and effort; it's gotten easier, but I wouldn't say it's easy. Just that it's possible...

Easiest way to tell if you're running a carrier version of the firmware is if the carriers app comes pre-loaded and won't allow uninstallation. Only "revert to factory version" and disabling the app are possible (this means it's in the protected OS space on your device). If you can fully uninstall it, or it is not present when you factory reset the device, you're probably running a clean version.

Of note, you can still run their app, the presence of the app as a default application usually means it's tied into a root-level service that restricts access to features and/or spies on you (probably both). The app itself is likely fine, but the underlying service is generally the troublemaker. The service may install with the app, but as long as it doesn't have root level permission, it can't stop you from using the features built into the phone.

I haven't been a huge Google fan lately, but I can say that mobile hotspot is included in my Google Fi plan.

I have Verizon. The "unlimited" plans are a huge scam, even if you can get your hotspot on, it's basically unusably slow. But if you can swap over to a pre-paid plan, which is a huge pain in the ass, you'll get ~15 GB a month for the same price and you can use it however you want. I don't know why they make it so damn hard to use their service.

I had to switch plans a couple of years ago and investigated a lot of options

Your best bet is prepaid, most of them don't have that bullshit.

I went with AT&T prepaid because it included data in Mexico in Canada, I pay $100 for 3 months of service (there's also $300 for 12mo), you can get prepaid cards discounted at target most of the time so you don't pay full price and it's supposed to be 8GB only but I have been over that data so many times and they never throttle down my speed