so I have a data plan on my phone. I have a need to tether veryinfrequently and with very small data use. Just a once-in-a-while thing where I need to use my laptop and I can’t get a wi-fi signal.
Is there something about the data being sent in a tethering situation that is fundamentally different from data being sent from your mobile phone? In other words, is there something in the data itself that alerts the phone company to your tethering?
Or is it all just inferred/suspected off of spikes in data usage?
I can’t answer whether or not they can outright detect whether you’re tethering but it depends on the carrier whether they care or not. I’ve tethered on T-Mobile for a while now and have never heard anything about it. I don’t think any of their phones have it enabled so it takes some tweaking to get it working. I frequent mobile phone forums and I’ve never heard of T-Mobile coming down on anyone for this.
And either Verizon or Sprint (both?) have plans for if you wish to tether. This is a wild ass guess, but I think a lot of it is having a phone that can run a program for tethering that disguises it as normal phone usage. I don’t think T-Mobile has any phones with tethering enabled by default, but that doesn’t stop people from enabling it by tweaks or programs.
I think a better question is what carrier do you have?
I get a hacker’s journal (for informational use only) and they love how open T-mobile is and what you can do if you really want but most of it is academic for non techno-geeks.
Like you suggested, it is a matter of the carrier caring in the first place enough to look for it. There should be ways to tell fairly easily just based on the content going through but that would require analyzing individual accounts and they wouldn’t have a good reason to for incidental use.
Well, the usage pattern for a laptop loading web pages is really pretty diffeerent from the usage pattern of a mobile device, so it isn’t that hard to flag if they want to. If you do it only very occasionally, it’s not likley you’re going to get busted for it.
I think crazyjoe means that you’ll be downloading way more web pages way quicker and right after each other on a laptop. It takes much longer to read it on a mobile device than a real laptop. But that means said carrier has to examine your usage.
I use ATT on an iphone plan but with a Nexus One phone which has easy tethering options. I’ve only tethered once (ironically, to share the connection with my iphone) but there are a lot of Nexus One/ATT users and I’ve never heard of any problems on the forums I frequent. Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there or that you can’t be the first, but I see nearly every post on the largest development forum and haven’t seen anything regarding ATT doing anything about tethering.
When I attempted to tether one night, in a DSL-outage fit of pique, I discovered that Verizon would let me pair my phone with my laptop, but wouldn’t let me get any further than a webpage telling me “hi, it’s cute that you figured out how to do this, but you ain’t getting no data, sister, because you haven’t coughed up the $60 extra per month that we want for you to be able to get sub 3G speeds on your laptop that will make you want to cry.”
More or less. On a typical mobile device you are going to be downloading much less data, etc than you would for a laptop. I mean, you mentioned getting your e-mail on your phone. It’s not that much different, assumign you have a full browser on your phone, but if you just wanted to get e-mail, you’d just use the phone.
I imagine you want to tether because you’ll be doing something unique to a computer rather than a mobile device. Those sorts of unique things have patterns which can be recognized. Typically, they can be audited for people who are abusing them. If you are tethering once per month for 15 minutes, they are probably not going to notice. It’s the people who buy a phone with a data plan and then also use it to tether on a regular basis they are looking to hose.
As for the Verizon example mentioned above, there is probably an embedded application on the phone which will report if it’s connected to a laptop and also trying to send wireless broadband data over the bluetooth connection. I suspect you would have less of a problem with one of the newer Android phones with a tethering app.
As a general rule, it’s Usage that will get you flagged. With Verizon it’s usually the magical 5gb per month mark, passing it puts you into into price-per-megabyte overage territory. It can vary due to phones, like Droid phones are supposed to have an additional 5gb allowance.
Please don’t start an argument about “but it says Unlimited, where are you getting 5gb from?” because this is already a very beaten dead horse discussion on forums like droidforums.net.
OP asked about the risks of infrequent tethering use, which I myself have done for several years across several phones with Verizon, just like OP says – “Just a once-in-a-while thing where I need to use my laptop and I can’t get a wi-fi signal”. If you don’t download a lot – like p2p, movies, mp3’s, or use your slingbox over it, you shouldn’t get flagged. Opening a Terminal Server or Remote Desktop over RDP, LogMeIn, etc, a few times a month, probably won’t even put you over 1GB let alone 5GB.
The phone company could easily inspect your HTTP traffic and look at the user-agent flag, which would report you are using a desktop browser. Same for sending emails through a desktop client.
They could also easily look at what servers you are connecting to - if they see connections to the Microsoft Windows Update service, they’ll know that’s coming from a computer, and not your phone.
Whether they care enough to actually implement any of these is another question.
You should be able to easily defeat all this by using an SSH tunnel to some http proxy you own and doing all your surfing that way. So I think they’re more likely to just look at total usage GB.
Phone companies are able to determine that your tethering because your computer/ laptop delivers this information to them… Could be by a simple ip address, or other sophisticated measures of identifying a device… I am sure that it’s not measured by data usage, because after jailbreaking a phone a person can have data usage that would appear far more unusual than a person simply tethering… I am speaking this from experience, AT&T has just recently contacted me about tethering… Something I rarely do. I was given until the 13th of May to abandon this unholy practice… Or else… The customer service rep explained that the consequence is to automatically upgrade… (downgrade) from unlimited data to a cap of 4 gig per month at the rate of 45 dollars. This news flash pissed me off because I still have the grandfather data plan (unlimited paying 30 bucks a month for data) why would I want to pay more to receive less… Well until there is a way to fool the phone companies… My tethering days are finished… I hope that message can help you out…
Data point: I have a T-Mobile/LG Optimus. Tethering is available in the settings menu and works flawlessly. With our low usage it makes sense to pay-as-we-go. That means $1.50 to data connect. Staying in a hotel that charges $15 for access (and some now per computer), it’s easy to bypass via tethering.