The "we'll throttle you after nnn Gb" is supposed to be the regulator. If they promise me 10Gb of full-rate data, it shouldn't matter whether I burn it in 30 minutes running rsync on a tethered laptop, or over 30 days of doomscrolling. Once it ticks down to the throttled 128kbps rate, then I have to decide to find a different plan.

That's something they could be clear about. Instead, it tends to be buried at the bottom of a bunch of obtuse "It's unlimited, for specific values of unlimited, and here are 82 other aspects that aren't quota or bandwidth numbers that make comparison shopping difficult" statements.

It doesn't matter how your got your phone. Most Android phones will respect the result of the tethering entitlement check, which is returned by your carrier.

I don't really know the full situation, but the intent was that your data plan has to include a "tethering" clause, and then your provider will unlock the tethering option on your phone.

Data plans may automatically include this clause, mine didn't, liberated ASOP rightfully ignores it, pureOS ignores it, apple... I don't know, does apple ignore it? but the stock pixel image honored it.

Apple did not fix much. It forced their hand on some things, but it’s absolutely still in bed with the carriers in general. Search for “iPhone carrier profiles” to learn more (and see my other comment on this thread).

These carrier profiles are preloaded with the OS (and updates are downloaded on-demand based on SIM ICCID and MCC/MNC) and even apply to phones purchased outright directly from Apple, and used as an anti-competitive way to control access to certain features such as visual voicemail, calls/SMS on Mac (if the carrier profile allows it, your Mac will connect directly to the carrier’s IMS server just like a WiFi-calling client and be able to make calls without having your iPhone nearby) or cellular Apple Watch provisioning. The necessary APIs, docs and access is conditional on signing an agreement with Apple including an NDA.

>"then apple fixed all that"

Market had fixed that many years before iphone existed

The 2G stuff worked almost everywhere in the US there was cell service, and when 3G came out it was only good in the big cities for a number of years.

Before USB, things that made a smartphone smart were its ability to get your laptop (or desktop) on the internet, anywhere that you had cell service. No differently than from a land line (except the land line did not charge by the minute unless it was long-distance). This is when you were paying for cellular voice service by the minute, with a certain number of free minutes included each month by this time. Dial-up ISP was on similar terms from a different provider like AOL, "always on" broadband was not very familiar yet and people were still accustomed to internet "sessions" where you log off as soon as you are finished.

With cellphones and ISPs most people were still acting like every session should be limited or it could end up running their minutes over, and for the relatively few who wanted portable internet it had always been double minutes (well from two providers) in cost so the airwaves were not filled with any significant data minutes compared to voice. If it could wait people would do it on a land line, even long conversations.

Oh, yeah, the cellphone itself was "on the internet" but about all it would do is email. Without a camera, color screen or very much of a keyboard the idea was to connect to a laptop if you needed portable internet.

Which is why the phones eventually had a free software suite from the manufacturer which included the PC drivers for its cellular modem so you could dial-up to places like AOL. It was a virtual COM port which the PC could address like it was internal hardware, dial out to any ISP you had an account with, and the modem naturally communicated with the answering party over regular phone lines like it was supposed to do. Once AT&T itself started offering broadband, they also had toll-free phone numbers posted for account holders to use when they were not at their home router. You could dial up from any land line or smartphone.

There was also a driver for the phone's virtual ethernet adapter if you wanted to use that, your phone would have an IP address. This is not the phone connecting by wifi, that came later.

It was the PC software that made smartphones smart, along with removable storage, and USB networking when it came along.

The early Motorola and Sony-Ericsson phones had infrared COM ports, to communicate with the early business laptops which had physical IR COM ports. Laptops were not yet affordable for very many students at all. IOW using Windows 98 over IR all you needed was the same built-in Windows apps to dial-up and log in to your ISP of choice, or alternatively autodial a fax machine and use Windows Faxing to send or receive a document straight from a file, with no paper involved at your end. Office 97 was not even necessary. Remember faxing was well established way before the internet got popular.

The virtual COM ports over USB or Bluetooth came later but served the same purpose.

After IR ports were long gone, the most common approach was using the USB cable but nobody called it "tethering" (that would have to wait until a different paradigm could be adopted and it could be billed for in an ongoing way). The USB cables were proprietary at one end and did cost about $30 extra so it was definitely not as popular as it could have been.

Sure enough, one day somebody decided they would get more cellphone customers if they had "unlimited minutes". And also, cellular carriers gradually became ISPs themselves.

But that basically meant that smartphone customers could have "always on" internet for the first time in history, even though it was not widely recognized.

Over about a year period the carriers disavowed all knowledge of specialized USB communication cables. This was still before the iPhone but I could tell things were going downhill, and wanted to get some spare Sony cables before my phone was discontinued and replaced by a less capable but more expensive unit. In the retail stores you could tell they were operating from a script when they said they had never had factory USB cords, and it was the same stores where they had been in stock in earlier years.

They did usher in a new generation of phones, a few of which would eventually communicate over generic USB cords. If you had a data plan, which would be charged extra, and there was no more factory cellphone software.

The carrier handled it all, that's when they started calling it "tethering", always meaning that there's "supposed to be" an upcharge, and acting like it's a new feature with never-before-seen convenience.

Fortunately the gigabytes have gotten liberal and it has gotten pretty convenient to enable tethering on Android, then connect any PC by USB or Bluetooth and be online.

As the article says, "it was pretty messy for a while there, and it had nothing to do with the devices. It was basically the providers getting in the way."

According to Visible, their tethering is limited to 5Mbps on their low-tier plan and 10Mbps on their upper-tier plan. That's still useful - you can even watch Netflix and stuff. However, the tethering is limited in speed.

The mobile data isn't limited in speed, just lower priority as you note.

https://support.google.com/fi/answer/9462101?hl=en

> Unlimited Plus plans allow up to 50 GB of full-speed data.

> any data used after you reach your data limit is throttled or slowed to 256 kbps

It can't be that simple? Doesn't the phone switch APN's when tethering is active? Or bridge the hotspot to a different APN?

Yeah that's probably how it works, except I don't know how to actually implement all of that myself, and it was a one time payment for use on all my devices. The only downside is connection is through usb or bluetooth. If you are aware of a way to put my un-rootable phone in hotspot mode that sidesteps the up-charge, please advise. When I had a pixel with Graphene installed this was possible.

I remember Palm OS being able to send and receive binary attachments via SMS (over Infrared or Bluetooth and an attached phone, I think). Not MMS, actually data SMS!

As far as I remember, a full screen JPEG (320x320 pixel) would have been thousands of messages according to the UI.

Having a phone plan where each text was dozens of cents, that UI scared me a lot.

CenturyLink is absolute trash. I live in a city full of people with CenturyLink and we all hate it. I also have coworkers with CL and they have been complaining about speeds. There's an entire thread on my cities subreddit about its poor performance as of late (for me about 6+ mo). I've never used CL anywhere but Denver, it's been the BY FAR most expensive and least reliable service I've had and something over the last 6ish months for me has made it awful. I didn't have many complaints aside from price until this year.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/1fbjx1y/centurylink... ing_issues/

I'm not referring to wifi at all. This is my fiber connection. I have a million devices, half of which aren't wifi.

I can barely run 2-3 youtube videos at 1080p - 4k each at a time right now. If my bedroom TV is playing a 1080p my desktop on ethernet may (not always) drop to auto-360p, etc.

I used to never have to think about changing my youtube video quality up higher and off auto until this year IIRC. I'm constantly changing youtube quality now or have TVs that will buffer forever if a video is playing elsewhere.

On my 2GB..

The positive of CL is their Outage detector is very accurate, I guess they probably get a lot of practice.

Yeah, I just get the unlimited plan. I've had this for ages. When I've wanted to tether, I've tethered. Two button presses.

There is no harm in keeping it at 65 permanently. Unless you think that TTL somehow helps to more uniquely identify you.

Linux uses a similar command:

sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_default_ttl=65

I assume there is an ipv6 version as well, but I haven't needed it.

You're the real mvp on this thread. Thanks I figured this was in place but never thought through the ttl bit.

You completely missed the point. There is no difference on the "shared medium" whether you use that data directly on your phone or on your PC through your phone.

Also, service providers shouldn't be allowed to make false advertisements. It is not the job of the consumer to think "clearly infinite data isn't realistic, I should have no expectation to actually get infinite data even though they advertise that". If it isn't technically feasible, it is the service provider's job to clearly state what they actually offer in practice.