On plans that have hotspot-specific data limits, how are those enforced?

[pangaea]

I'm just curious as to how they enforce this, especially if someone has a phone that wasn't provided by the carrier. Are phone manufacturers under any obligation to report to cell service companies what type of data you use? Do they have some sort of a monitoring system in place? I've only ever had plans that provide a specific amount of high speed data and don't distinguish between hotspot and mobile so I'm curious how this would work.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Here is a good post about how they know if your tethering https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/47819/how-can-phone-companies-detect-tethering-incl-wifi-hotspot#48408

 

Basically Some clues are

 

The phone telling the carrier

TTL

OS fingerprints

Destination IP and DNS

Looking at the type of data being sent.

[pangaea]

35 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Here is a good post about how they know if your tethering https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/47819/how-can-phone-companies-detect-tethering-incl-wifi-hotspot#48408

 

Basically Some clues are

 

The phone telling the carrier

TTL

OS fingerprints

Destination IP and DNS

Looking at the type of data being sent.

Are they able to enforce these limits on people who just have a non-carrier phone they bought on Amazon? Or do they allow those phones on these types of plans?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, pangaea said:

Are they able to enforce these limits on people who just have a non-carrier phone they bought on Amazon? Or do they allow those phones on these types of plans?

Yep, they can see all your data, so they know a good amount about whats going on.

 

 

[Donut417]

9 hours ago, huilun02 said:

???

That doesnt help 100%. They kinda figure things out when you use 100s of Gigs or TB of data in a month. Most people cant do that on a phone alone. You might get an angry call from the provider. Hell I was talking to a Tmobile employee the last time I had to go to the T Mobile store. He said, after a while of using apps like this and having enormous usage, he got a call about it. 

 

The carriers are not stupid. They know these apps exist. But they also have expectations on what an average phone user can use in a month data wise. 

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, huilun02 said:

idgaf

Never been to NA

What does NA have to do with it. All ISPs have an acceptable use policy. If you violate that you get your shit turned off or throttled. 

[Zodiark1593]

Using a non-carrier device or a custom rom can allow the user to force tethering, even if a carrier explicitly forbids it, and can also avoid directly exposing to the carrier that tethering is in use. I can use tethering on my own device, whether or not I actually have service (which came in handy for a couple lan games). In contrast, carrier devices tend to check to see if tethering is allowed before activating it. I would wager iPhones will do a carrier check as well.

 

However, discretion is strongly advised if you're ordinarily forbidden from doing so. I don't believe carriers will care very much for very sparse, brief uses of unapproved tethering, though they have leverage in contract to deliver some steep repercussions if you choose to abuse it. Remember to turn off anything on the PC that will automatically update so as to avoid shooting yourself in the foot face.

 

On an aside, T-Mobile's binge-on functions regardless of whether you're consuming video content on your phone, or using tethering to do so. We've utilized this to cut the cable without having any home internet besides mobile phones. Presumably, because the data rate during streaming is cut down, T-Mobile doesn't seem care much as we'd been doing so for several years now.