Android

Since never, unless you live in the corporate hellscape - most sensible parts of the world have regulations about this, but I guess not being ripped off is un-american or something?

If your phone is unlocked then this feature is free already.

Long time ago, but it’s entirely dependent upon carrier.

Mint for example doesn’t have an extra fee for hotspot. Mine didn’t work after setting up service and I had to chat them, but they fixed it and it works fine. Cricket didn’t charge for it for a long time, until they did, and I no longer use them as a result.

You just need to find a carrier that includes it for no fee. At least you can vote with your wallet on those things. And when they ask why you are canceling and porting your number, be honest it’s because of their hotspot policy, and other carriers don’t charge for it.

If my carrier did this I would switch. Having a backup connection for outages at home has saved my butt multiple times.

Yup, I can stream 1080p videos all day long on my phone, use tb of data, no issue from AT&T, no throttling, no overcharge. Switch on my Hotspot and go above 20gb on my laptop? That's a paddlin!

Fucking, greedy shitbags.

The US carriers have been fighting the battle for years between expanding the networks providing high speed data and competing with other carriers to provide it more cheaply.

If you're sitting on a plan that's 5 or 10 years old you could be sitting on a 30 or 60 gig plan where you can do whatever you want with those gigs.

Or you could be sitting on a brand new super cheap plan that blocks you from tethering altogether if they can.

Or you could be sitting on one of their top tier unlimited plans where you can tether up to 20 or 30 gig.

The numbers features and prices seem to change with the wind and they're not often in the mood to kick you out of your existing plans.

The carriers all have pretty bad capacity issues in urban and rural areas were they either have too many people or not enough towers per square mile. They're all trying to expand but every time you have a local power outage and everyone tries to use their cell phone at the same time nobody gets through anywhere for data.

What phone do you have? I've never heard of an android phone not having wifi Hotspot....

AFAIK an unlocked phone can hotspot no matter what. My plan does not include mobile hotspot data and yet I use it all the time.

If you have an Android download pdanet which lets you hotspot count as phone data. Also if you get a small hotspot but unlimited phone data you can turn it on and set the TTL or connecting devices to 65 (I think look it up) and it will think it's the phone connecting. Happy pirating

I have never even heard that was a thing. Wow.

Canadians might have some of the shittiest service and prices in the world, but at least we don't pay extra to hotspot?

I agree. Long ago, mobile Hotspot just came with my plans. Now it's extra, which is stupid. Just another way for them to make $$

No clue if this will work for you or not, but there are a few things you might try.

1. Increase the TTL for packets on your computer from 64->65 or from 128->129. It makes it harder for them to tell that the traffic isn't coming to the phone.
2. If you can live with USB tethering and also do #1, I have had zero problems. And got much better speeds than with any hotspot.
3. If the OS is blocking this then... yeah sorry... join the Free World and get a custom ROM.

I have Verizon. The "unlimited" plans are a huge scam, even if you can get your hotspot on, it's basically unusably slow. But if you can swap over to a pre-paid plan, which is a huge pain in the ass, you'll get ~15 GB a month for the same price and you can use it however you want. I don't know why they make it so damn hard to use their service.

If you're running Android you can use PDAnet to act as a mobile hotspot. You can connect your devices to your phone through wifi.

Edit: I didn't notice what community this was posted in. Obviously you're using Android 🤦

Visible service has unlimited hotspot/tethering, however its throttled.

For a while I used it as my main internet connection by tethering it via USB to a router that spoofed the TTL packets, which bypassed the throttling.

I had to switch plans a couple of years ago and investigated a lot of options

Your best bet is prepaid, most of them don't have that bullshit.

I went with AT&T prepaid because it included data in Mexico in Canada, I pay $100 for 3 months of service (there's also $300 for 12mo), you can get prepaid cards discounted at target most of the time so you don't pay full price and it's supposed to be 8GB only but I have been over that data so many times and they never throttle down my speed

It was like this for a long time- depending on plan and carrier. It happened even on my window mobile phone in 2008

I haven't been a huge Google fan lately, but I can say that mobile hotspot is included in my Google Fi plan.

cunt-faced shitbags

I like this part

Ummm. I use the hotspot on my Android and iPhone fairly regularly. Didn't have to root or jailbreak anything. Just turn on and go. Both on Verizon.

Are you sure there isn't some setting you aren't enabling first??

This is the reason I was forced to use android and root my phone. I used a custom ROM to bring back the tethering option then connect to a VPN and used the rooted terminal to mess with the iptables and routing to mask the fact I was tethering. Uuuugh, I don't miss those days. Luckily the market changed in my country and went the other direction so I don't have to deal with this anymore.. Still have the old shell scripts saved tho ;)

This is wild. I live in Ireland. For €12.99 a month, I get 200GBs of data, unlimited texts and calls to other mobile phones in Ireland.

I use my hotspot A LOT and have never paid extra for it lol. I can't imagine paying more for it.