Can you get caught tethering

Learn more. How can phone companies detect tethering incl. Wifi hotspot Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 4 months ago. Active 5 years, 11 months ago. Viewed k times. It can be done with deep packet inspection. You can fight back with TOR, tunnels and vpn's surrounded by Stacheldraht. Active Oldest Votes. However there are certain known techniques that will give away the fact that you're currently tethering, if your Service Provider happens to be running the right tool to check for these indicators: Your Phone asks your network if tethering is allowed The first and easiest method is that some phones will query the network to check whether the current contract allows tethering, and then totally disable the tethering options on the device in software if not.

Your phone tells your network that you are tethering It's also rumoured that some phones have a second set of APN details saved in them by the phone network, when you enable tethering they switch over to using this second APN for all tethered traffic, while using the normal APN for traffic originating on the phone.

Community Bot 1. Awesome answer! So I booked a very good offer and, yes, tethering with my Android 2. I suspect this is what is happening with my cell. Ever since I "upgraded" to 5. Even when I use https which would mask the user agent, which is how they used to do it. How can I tell if my phone is in cahoots with my provider? Infact, if you somehow identified on your internet interface by the tethered devices MAC it would never route.

I have a family plan with tethering. Taking the sim card out of my iPad which has tethering and putting it into a rooted HTC one allowed tethering just fine. However, stock android says that I do not have tethering on my plan. Is there a non-root way to get around this? Show 1 more comment. Having said this, these methods have some significant limitations. Timing offset from start of use until detection can take minutes Detection can be neutralised by using end-user encryption Using all possible fingerprinting techniques often result in triggering false positives So the reality is that tethering detection is a balancing act from an operator perspective.

Add a comment. Usually phones from plans like this yours, came from the virgin mobile, they actually edit the system of the phone. They disable the Hotspot Add your answer. Suggested Solutions 10 What's this? Anonymous "You are responsible for all data activity from and to your mobile Yes, From Virgin Mobiles TOS: "Specific Terms and Restrictions regarding Data Services If your plan includes data services, such services are provided solely for purposes of web browsing, messaging, and similar activities.

You are responsible for all data activity from and to your mobile phone or device regardless of who initiates the activity. You may not use the data service Was this answer helpful? Yes No. This answer closely relates to:. Usually phones from plans like this yours, came from the virgin mobile , they actually edit the system of the phone. They disable the Hotspot WiFi , so that no one can ever connects in your phone using tethering.

Or they gonna block it so that you will not allow to share your connection coming from virgin mobile. Company giving phone plans, sometimes very much wise.

They do not allow their user to use overlap in the plan. Well those application might need to use internet access for them to RUN. There are this applications that relies to the internet for you to use it.

Unless you have internet then those application will not start up since they are connecting to a certain server.

As for the Internet you can try to call your network carrier and see if they can give you a good plan that will be able you to access internet from time to time if not everytime. It depends on the activity you are doing in the internet. Think of wifi tethering as if you are connected directly to the internet. If you are browsing videos then yes it will you a lot of data. If you are just reading news on a website you are using a low data usage. Anonymous 0. Anonymous If you want the ability to give apples to friends to eat, then it will costs extra.

That totally sounds like a startup idea. Maybe have an app or webpage where you push a button and some contracted delivery person brings you an apple. Oh hell yeah, this is my topic. I'm tethered right now to Sprint which really doesn't appear to give a shit.

Their network is encapsulated to all hell since it's ipv6-only so I recommend decreasing MTU's when connecting to it something like seems to work or sites like duckduckgo get blackholed. T-Mobile detects tethering a matter of ways. I modified lineageOS I disable ipv6 on the t-mobile APN too as an added layer of protection.

This was for T-Zones service level in the early 's. What part of your process gets you around deprioritization? I thought that there was no way to circumvent that. I had to tether for a month or two on tmo and as soon as I hit 22 or 25GB my entire account was throttled and I'd barely get 2MBps.

I wound up going with an ATT ipad plan that also had deprio at a point 30gb? I forget. But everything about the ATT plan was so much better. I tried a lot of ways to get around that most of what you mentioned, tweaking my hops and what not and never made any progress so I assumed it was at the network level and I'd have no control.

It's handled on the radio layer and what usually appears to happen is the network will only allocate you a few physical resource blocks. So speeds will vary based on what modulation your device can get away with and how busy things are.

If you're like me and live on a mountain surrounded by trees with a line of sight to the tower down the hill, deprio isn't going to matter. Pings will work, sites will connect, but you'll get no data back. This can seem awfully like some kind of active interference, when it's just a passive network problem.

Slickdeals has a long in-depth thread on the full details of this arrangement. I personally use UbiFi. How did you add TTL as an iptables target? Would you mind sharing your patch? There is only one justified reason for phone companies to check if you are using your phone as a router, and that is when they provide unlimited data to your contract. Unlimited data is provided given that you are going to use it on your personal devices and not to act as an ISP to everyone around you.

Other than that you generally pay for X GB of data and it is none of their business how you spend it. I would argue from a "well regulated market" perspective that is not justified either. A byte's a byte. I would not disagree : and i think they came up with unlimited data plans just to label bytes in the future. And they are already doing that. Makes me sad. A byte you will certainly use is much more expensive than a byte you are unlikely to use. If we mandated a single price it would get more expensive for non-tetherers.

A byte for your use is not the same as a byte for someone else's use. Setting up a hot spot for other people could be viewed as reselling the service even if you don't charge for it. It's still creating restrictions that go against the "natural" behavior of the medium. That's why they need sophisticated tech solutions to enforce it - it's not natural to label bytes, it's not natural to even talk about using the connection yourself vs.

Copyright laws are restrictions that go against the "natural" behavior of any digital medium. Yet we still imple,ent and enforce them. That's what restrictions are , a way to turn ugly reality into a situation that's more felicitous for everyone. That's why copyright laws ended up being a total dumpster fire. They're a desperate attempt at making digital data behave as if it were Gutenberg-era books.

Not only they fight uphill against the medium, but by refusing to be grounded in reality, they opened themselves to abuse - and thus became captured by the rent-seekers from various industries. If you aren't profiting, you aren't reselling. If they're going to offer "unlimited data", then they should give exactly that. If you want to share it with the whole neighborhood, that's your business. If that's a technical problem for them, then they shouldn't be offering "unlimited data" in the first place.

But this is cartel behavior. Apple and Google are acting against their customer's interest to appease a 3rd party. Let's hope enough people get on board with EW's plans to break these guys up and regulate them.

If someone advertises "unlimited data" I expect unlimited data. The way they usually avoid abuse is by capping high-speed 3G or more transfer to only some amount e. CraigRood on July 17, root parent next [—]. Here in the UK Ofcom governing body over communications are pretty strict with what you can adversise.

For home broadband, providers have to give realisic numbers to prospective customers - not just an "up-to". For mobile, they have to be transparent in what they provide. So unlimited data, is just that, unlimited. End of last year there was an investigation opened against two providers due to throttling and limiting tethering data domestically, still have roaming restricitions when under an unlimited plan. They both agreed to remove the limits as they would both likely have to change their advertised plans if they didnt.

ThePirateofOz on July 17, parent prev next [—]. I used to do consulting for an international telecom One telco customer did not have tethering limitations in their customer contract agreements, so this one end users customer bought a number of devices, and then would resell internet service in local rural areas using his devices as backhaul. That's not a tethering problem though, all ISPs have a no resale clause to prevent this. Unlimited within the ToS should be unlimited.

Very interesting! I'm on a budget mobile service provider Cricket , and only recently discovered that they disable using my phone as a hotspot on my plan. I called them up, because I wouldn't mind paying a small amount extra every month to have that ability. However, they told me that they actually couldn't provide it with my phone even if I paid, because they didn't support my phone Pixel. Then they tried to upsell me on "compatible phones" I used this phone as a hotspot with my previous provider, so I know it can be a hotspot.

But I don't know much about the technical side of this. Does anyone know if what they're saying is plausible? Ie, they can't offer it for my specific phone I briefly tried a few apps for this purpose, but none of them worked. Can't comment on Cricket, but I'm researching low-cost carriers at the moment and discovered a similarly curious situation regarding Republic Wireless.

I found some strange restrictions in the plan regarding tethering, looked into it and found they don't support iPhones at all. They of course can only enforce this in Android devices by futzing with the network stack at a level Apple doesn't allow. Interesting, I used Republic a few years ago during their beta period.

Now I can't find any mention of routing over wifi on their main pages. It makes a lot of sense and I have several friends who use similar services. But if Tethering disables wifi at least connecting to wifi as your phone is now acting as a router then their hybrid component breaks and only uses cell which may be throttled, limited, or not available.

It sounds like more a CYA against higher bills from whoever they are renting service from while keeping their Hybrid setup functional for better service. I think it's more that they won't shut up about it. Their entire business model and their marketing is all based on the idea that most people are around wifi most of the time. The cell data you pay for is your cell data usage, you of course don't pay them for your wifi data usage. ISL on July 17, parent prev next [—].

Have a look at Ting. No worries with tethering with my Pixel or any other device I've tried. What happens when you try?

Does it pop up a message saying that your provider hasn't authorised it? Part of the reason I moved carriers, also the new one has unlimited data which is better anyhow. Vodafone had no idea what was going on, although they did try. Eventually they just said they couldn't help. Anyway, maybe something similar going on for you. When I try to turn it on, a dialog box pops up, telling me to go to some att website or dial I think att because Cricket piggybacks off them.

So basically Google that made Pixel is betraying users by giving out that they want to use tethering? My Google annoyance is that they don't build call recording into the phone. I know they probably do it to avoid their customers getting into trouble using it where they shouldn't but there are lots of illegal things I can do with my phone that they don't try to police.

The problem is that feature would constitute something made explicitly for illegal uses, much like drug paraphernalia, so would expose them to huge liability. Of course, it's only in some states like Maryland where recording conversations without permission is illegal, but that's enough.

MrStonedOne on July 18, root parent next [—]. Google already has this, with google voice, press 4 during a call to start recording it. One: most laws do not require permission or consent per say, simply having the feature also pimp out a recording that says "Call is now being recorded" like the google voice feature already does is enough to keep it legal.

Two: "Made explicitly for illegal uses" is a wide stretch for a call recording feature. I don't use Google Voice anymore but I was never able to get call recording to work. For one, I think it only worked on incoming calls which is pretty useless. They could leave hooks in there and let third parties build out the apps that do the recording.

At least with android, i can install an app outside of the app store like foxfi [0] that will allow me to tether it. IOS also blocks users from tethering if their carrier doesn't allow it and you cannot get around that without jailbreaking. This is one of my favorite things about switching to android. PopeDotNinja on July 17, parent prev next [—].

I know Cricket user who rooted their Pixel 3a to get around this problem. Seems to work fine for them. I found that option while searching, but I don't want to risk messing up my phone. Magisk Android rooted-phone modding platform has a Tethering Enabler module, but it hasn't been updated to recent versions of Magisk Magisk constantly breaks compatibility with older modules. There was an update not released on their official download channel, and it works for me. Do be aware though that I haven't found a generic way to bypass TTL detection, as most solutions use the "mangle" table in iptables, which requires a kernel module on Android.

Unfortunately, this is not generic and would be per-kernel. They probably haven't developed the whitelisting for this particular phone. TTL is a nice cheap trick. This is another excellent question from the earlier days of stackexchange that are all now "offtopic".

Its sad to see it consistently lose informative questions. Stackexchange's policy shift toward marking any slightly general question as offtopic is a sad state of affairs. On windows adjusting the TTL is simple. I have to carry two devices because of this. Totally agree. It's a market failure that a company that makes a device that you buy is more interested in pleasing another company the telcom than you the customer. In a market with competition device manufacturers would be fighting over adding features like anonymous teathering for their customers, and phone companies would be charging for data use, and with enough competition that use-per-byte would become dirt cheap quickly.

If it's your hardware, you're free to install your own software which does not honor those checks. But apparently you can't do that, so it's not entirely your hardware, as you can't run any code on it.

This hasn't been true for a while. Anyone can build and install their own iPhone apps, the requirement to buy a developer license went away a while ago. I'm talking about OS. Apple has so much control that you can't even install their own OS without their explicit permission, so you can't rollback to a previous version.

Can't as in impossible to do, or aren't 'allowed' to? You can do a lot of things rolling your own local apss that would never pass App Store review. Even with an android device or any certified device the radio portion is not your device: you can't modify its firmware. The radio portion cannot stop you from using tethering though. Is it not the very exact externality interfacing with the carrier's network that is being discussed here?

Not exactly. Radio chip firmware is responsible for controlling the physical layer, and restricting access to it is a practical compromise that ensures people don't generally cause RF interference for one another. The problem discussed upthread is on the application layer - you not being able to run arbitrary code on your own device because companies prefer to please one another rather than their customers. What a carrier-friendly product.

I miss TetherMe. If it upsets you so much, why do you use an iPhone? Can't get iMessage, but the security side on pixels is quite good. Lack of iMessage is a complete non-starter, sadly. No, it's not. This has been shown time and again. You have to make it your own. You usually gotta "color outside the lines" if you want anything cool, i. I'm surprised no one's tried hackiosing on custom hardware, although it would take a pile of enginerding and gnidrenigne. It is not yours. Do you decide what it does?

No, Apple does what it may do. Can you use as you see fit? No Apple decides what is fit. Can you modify as you see fit? Apple DRM decides what you may modify. You do not own the device, Apple does. The device is Apple's slave. It obeys its master and not you. The law even backs up this, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids you from doing what you want with it.

If you don't live in the US, don't worry your home is probably a party to WIPO and anti-circumvention is illegal there too. It is not your hardware. Your "ownership" is abrogated by law.

Causality1 on July 17, prev next [—]. You need to have it configured on the guest device as well. What reasoning would they have for that? It's an Android stackexchange after all. It's my main caveat against the stackexchange network, many questions like this one are extremely useful and on-topic but the moderation has some weird standards of whats on-topic and what is not; one of the worst examples is when one particular question is the first result on Google about a common problem but due over-moderation is now closed and nobody can enter updated answers, such is the case for "Is there a tool to convert JavaScript to Typescript?

However, one app would make calls out with a User Agent that looked like IE6 which caused the network to disconnect my data and require me to phone up to get it unblocked. I put Cyanogenmod on a device and tethered for years without any carrier warnings. Then I accidentally got a device with a locked bootloader and tethered by rooting it to switch a flag; I got a warning from that one. Then I got another open device, put LineageOS on it and tethered uneventfully for another couple years. A few years ago, they cancelled it due to tethering.

I don't think it works anymore, but it used to be that you could get around tether-blocking in MetroPCS by simply setting your user-agent string to Chrome Android; they moved to something more clever because I guess enough dorks like me figured it out. After several years of good service, I was accused by my telco Cricket of tethering without paying the special fee and my phone was disabled. Found this out in the middle of a trip.