Were we live we don’t have access to high speed internet. Instead we have to rely on a 4g connection through our cell phones. This has worked very well except that we are limited to only 3gb of high speed data a month. After we hit the limit we are throttled to the slower network speed. Recently I called T Mobile as I had passed the 3g limit and I was told I could upgrade to unlimited high speed data for an additional $10 per month, but only 3gb could be used for tethering. This is great as I now have unlimited high speed access, but truthfully using the cell phone to browse the internet is tedious.
How does a carrier know if you’re tethering your phone to a laptop or tablet? It seems to me that data is data. I use a program for android that turns on and off the WiFi tethering on the phone
How does the carrier know that the data is tethered data vs. regular phone data?
The reason I’m asking is that all of a sudden I’m not able to acres the internet via my tablet. None of my settings have been changed, but when I try to access a web page on my tablet I keep getting DNS server cannot be found. I’m thinking that I’ve hit my 3g limit and T mobile has somehow disabled my ability to tether for the remainder of the month. Can they do this?
The carriers can easily tell, but they usually don’t care as long as you stay within your usage cap.
It’s likely another internet issue. Wait a few hours/day or two and see if it improves. You can also try setting your DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google’s DNS) to see if it helps.
As for how they can tell, “data is data” only if it’s all well-encrypted, as through a modern VPN. Otherwise, go to http://www.whatsmyuseragent.com/ and it’ll tell you what device you’re using.
Every time you load a web page, your browser tells the server what kind of phone you’re on, which operating system, etc. And even if they didn’t do that, different devices have different signatures: Windows machines will occasionally reach out to Microsoft’s servers to ask for updates, Macs will talk to Apple, they’ll all talk to different Internet time providers, etc.
You can configure your browser to transmit a different user agent string (basically lie about what browser you are using) to disguise the fact that you are using a desktop browser. However, this may cause websites to display weirdly or redirect you to mobile versions of the site.
Yes, but that alone won’t fool any carrier that actually wants to ID tetherers. As noted above there are a lot of trivial ways to detect what kind of device someone is using. You have to hide all of them, not just one or two.
No doubt it’s technically feasible to detect whether you’re tethering or not, but is there any indication that they actually have the kind of data monitoring in place that would be required to do so? I use a tethering app to get around Verizon’s $10/month tethering fee. If there were an easy way to detect this and make me pay up, I’d be astounded that Verizon wasn’t doing it.
I just tried the web site above and this is what I got
Your User Agent String is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.137 Safari/537.36
Trouble is that by doing that, you probably identify all of your non-handset bandwidth, because most of the data consumed by the handset is probably not hidden away in a VPN tunnel.
Verizon isn’t doing it because people who do that don’t make up a substantial enough portion of their bandwidth, and the few people who do cause issues get tethered. I don’t have the cites right now, but you can dig through several years of EVDOinfo.com forums if you really want to.
Also, Verizon (alone) bought some spectrum from the FCC and one of the conditions was that they’re not allowed to discriminate against different types of 4G data usage. But the other carriers don’t have this restriction either and generally don’t care either because ultimately there’s not enough people who do it. If 80% pay your $10 a month fee and the 20% don’t but feel like they need to sneak under the radar to do so, it’s probably better to let them keep doing that than to risk a PR backlash and net neutrality regulations when you piss off that tech-savvy 20%.
For backward compatibility. Netscape Navigator (one of the earliest browsers) called itself by its codename Mozilla, and Mozilla the project adapted it and Firefox the browser and every other major browser adapted it too. Because websites were coded to identify the word “Mozilla” and display a certain type of webpage for Netscape Navigator and its successors, versus NTSC Mosaic or Lynx or whatever, and the practice just caught on. The “like Gecko” part is another compatibility thing that browsers tag on to pretend like they’re close enough to Firefox’s renderer, codenamed Gecko.
The real information is the other stuff. Windows NT 6.1 means you’re using Windows 7, and WOW64 means you’re using a 64-bit system. Webkit is your renderer (which is actually another compatibility lie because Chrome now uses Blink), and Chrome is the real name, but Safari is kept there for compatibility purposes too.
It’s hellacious.
Yes, but you could conceivably at least argue that your company requires VPN access for your handset traffic. The point is that it’s trivial to identify this traffic, and they don’t it for political/business/cost reasons, not technical ones.
Sorry, they get THROTTLED, not tethered (or at least they did before the FCC requirements).
The non-Verizon carriers, absent the FCC requirement, presumably have different ways of dealing with this issue. If you stay under the radar nothing will happen. If you start using insane amounts of data, far exceeding what people do on their phones, then maybe they’ll have an issue with you. Basically T-Mobile is bankrolled by big European companies and Sprint is too desperate, and their coverage too shitty, for them to seriously enforce tethering things. They need everything they’ve got to make you not go to Verizon. In general, the bigger the carrier/network, the tighter the tethering rules, with the exception of Verizon because of the FCC.