Tethering is idiot expensive in USA. Every provider will DPI and block it or throttle it. It's awful.

I've had a very cheap provider in the US for years that has unlimited tethering/hotspot, and unlimited everything else.

I've "only" ever used it for as much as 1 or 2TB in a month, though -- which is a ton for most individuals. (And only occasionally. It Isn't my primary connection, but sometimes it is a very useful connection.)

(They do attempt to throttle it, but that's been solvable for me with just a TTL hack on a client/router or a PDANet fix on my particular devices.)

Did you mean 1 or 2 GB?

Hah, no. I do mean terabytes.

There's ways to get this done (at least here in the US) for those who are sufficiently motivated.

Yes, but its quite unfortunate in that you cannot do what you want with the data you pay for. Even in plan which not unlimited when I buy in visiting USA, I cannot even use the x GB I purchase without restriction.

I should not need to resorting TTL „unsupported hacks“ which also say company will ban me for.

Eh? What I pay for with my cheap-shit cellular connectivity is to use as much data as I wish, either on the phone itself and/or for exactly 1 hotspot-connected device, at speeds of up to 5Mbps for that singular hotspot-connected device. I can stay within the operating parameters of the service I signed up for by using up to 5Mbps with hotspot (along with literally-unlimited[1] bandwidth on the phone itself) all of the time, 24/7.

I absolutely do get what I pay for, and I absolutely do what I want with it, and let me tell you: I am not paying very much. I have nothing to complain about here.

But I am not alone when I occasionally extend that to more than one device (using a router), and/or using TTL mangling to negate the 5Mbps limit. I've never witnessed anyone being banned for this (and I've paid close-enough attention to the noises people make that if banning were a common thing, I'd have seen the screaming at least one time by now).

Indeed, some people (in some areas, with some devices) don't seem to have either 5Mbps nor 1-device limits on their phone's built-in hotspot -- without any hacks at all.

And while I have used it (and hacks to improve it) rather extensively at various times and for various reasons, I don't typically use it as a primary Internet connection at home:

While my (also inexpensive) DOCSIS connectivity at home is often slower than what my phone can provide on a given day, I prefer the stability and consistent latency of DOCSIS compared to using my phone's hotspot, and I like having my home LAN always-connected regardless of whether I am at home or not, and also I enjoy having my phone's battery last for days instead of hours between charges (wifi hotspot is a huge battery suck on a phone).

In terms of visiting the States: I don't know what to tell you. I've lived here my whole life so I don't ever travel to the US, but this service is not really intended for visitors. It can probably be made to happen with the help of a friend who does live here, but I don't think anyone but you was ever trying to address any issues of visiting the US here in these threads.

Is there a particular aspect about that concept that you'd like to more-thoroughly address?

I can answer questions.

[1]: Everything has limits, and bandwidth cannot ever be infinite, so "unlimited" is with a grain of salt.

Huh. It's interesting that tethering restrictions are implemented via your device, i.e. the device you paid for working against you. Most Android custom ROMs bypass this, and tethering is always enabled regardless of whether your telecom wants you or not.

My $15/mo plan in the US can pull hundreds of megabits at 20ms latency to most sites tethered. Tethering is baked into most phone plans and from my experiences not throttled any more than the regular phone data. Most plans have it, even the cheap prepaid options.

Tethering is free on my US T-Mobile account. I use it instead of crappy hotel Internet connections. Performance very much depends on your location, as the network is often shaky outside of cities.

I discovered my Turkish ISP is actually capable of relaying me anything that isn’t Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, Google or YouTube traffic reliably once I started using WireGuard VPN with a cheap DigitalOcean VPS.

My $35/mo Visible plan offers throttled but unlimited hotspot for one device.

very easy to bypass simply by increasing TTL by 1

And what's the very easy way to do that?

Unless your phone is rooted, TTL mangling happens on the hotspot-using client devices.

Specific details depend on what that client device uses for an operating system, and this makes it impossible to neatly summarize.

But it can be done fairly easily with things like OpenWRT or Mikrotik's RouterOS, or a regular stand-alone Linux box, and IIRC it's a simple one-liner on a Windows machine.

Because it can't be easily summarized, Google is your friend here. Generally, you want the TTL of all packets leaving the client (router, tablet, laptop, or whatever) to be set to 65 -- which is one more than the Android default of 64.

That's all the information you need to know to Google up instructions that work with your particular devices.

(I may or may not keep a Mikrotik-based hotspot-abuser in my work truck as a problem solver.)

Ok that does seems more viable than mangling it on the average Android phone. Unless of course you're tethering another smartphone by sharing the wifi hotspot, which in my personal experience is a common use case.

Yeah, rootless smartphone-to-smartphone (or tablet) is a harder problem to solve without an intermediary device.

But! That intermediary device could be something like a Raspberry Pi Zero.

It isn't "low power" by the strictest definitions, but it is also not particularly expensive power-wise -- it can be powered with USB OTG from a smartphone from the past decade or so. And it is very small, which also counts.

It can obviously run a real Linux distro (or just parts of one), but can also run OpenWRT -- which by nature tends to tolerate intermittent power very well.

It's theoretical, but (again in theory): A Zero W running OpenWRT might be a relatively simple path for a portable hotspot abuser.

First, dump OpenWRT onto an SD card, plug it in an and get in there with a browser -- however that is done.

Second: Create an interface or two for getting hotspot data into it: Maybe one of them via wifi, and another via USB tethering from the connected phone.

Third: Test. At least the Pi itself should have Internet connectivity by this point.

Fourth: Set it up as a wifi access point (I think that chipset can do both at once in OpenWRT), and get NAT going.

Fifth: Utter the well-documented incantations for mangling TTL on all of the hotspot interfaces.

Sixth: Wrap it in nice 3M Super 33+ electrical tape for posterity and a minimum of protection for those tiny SMD parts.

Seventh: ???

Eighth: Profit!!! Or, better: Push the resulting SD card image to the usual places, with correct attribution and license compliance, so that others can benefit more-easily.

Seems doable. To use, just power it on/plug it in, and turn tethering/hotspot on with the donor phone. And then connect other phones to the WiFi AP provided by the Pi.

It'll eat phone batteries pretty quick, but it might last long enough to get someone else out of a jam. (It'll also work well on a portable power bank, and those are also cheap.)

Maybe it's also a generational thing. In the 90s, I remember running my own squid proxy on a remote shared box somewhere, in order to circumvent "things."

Granted, today, if it was just getting around general network restrictions via blacklist, then tethering is very convenient.

Ssh -D is quite handy

Tinyproxy also, when socks5 isn't supported

Depending on carrier, the parent can turn off data on the child's line and only allow it to be used for voice/text.