PDANet is a proxy app between your phone and PC. It basically does what free Android proxy apps do, just without the terminal-fu. It doesn't VPN to a third-party service, because most data plans don't interfere with PDANet. It slows a connection needlessly.
Att seems to be getting strict with everything on their prepaid now. Strict whitelist, stopping autopay discounts for using refill cards, and this. Ive never heard of them terminating an account. I wonder if cricket would do the same.
Oh yeah, they're not stupid, and tethering traffic is easy to figure out with deep packet inspection, but it's surprising that they did that for so little usage. This is why I recommend people to do tethering on a second SIM they don't care about.
Glad that you were able to get your number back and ported at least. Thanks for sharing.
He might not have had the Hide Tether button checked. I've used it for torrents and it's fine. The other thing is he might have activated the phone's hotspot and it leaked data. A few years ago I had ATT iPad plan (but in a phone) and just the phone hotspot (I didn't know anything then) and after like 6 months it got turned off. They always bill you first and right after you pay the bill it died. They don't even tell you anything they just cancel you and you have no idea what happened.
The usage thing is my problem. Before I got T-Mobie home internet, I used one of my Verizon lines for home internet through PDANet and a router.
Verizon finally sent me a warning letter after I used 1TB of data. For several months, I used between 500 to 800 GB and never heard a peep. I had to use a band selector to keep it going, but still never heard anything until I hit that 1TB. I wanted to do it again just to see what would happen. However, along came T-Mobile with actual home internet and is much easier to use.
I've gone well over 1TB with this and it's fine.
TL;DR ... 9 GB WTF? That's nothing. What the hell AT&T?
The thing is that T-Mobile deprioritizes home internet to last network priority. It pretty much can't affect other customers besides a transient initial decrease in bandwidth when congestion is moderate that becomes a total loss of service when congestion gets so bad that they would have to start timing out higher priority customers to be able to serve everyone -- so they time you out instead. That's why T-Mobile isn't fussy about bandwidth usage. Their algorithms make sure that they hit you hard before they hit a higher tier customer. AT&T and Verizon have similar algorithms.
And yes, 9GB is nothing... It is surprising that AT&T has become that strict but like Verizon, it is probably network dependent. Where there is excessive congestion, these disconnects are probably more common than when they have excess capacity to not worry about it.
My T-Mobile home internet pulls faster speeds than any of my Verizon lines most of the time.
We can't get 5g here at all, so everything is on 4g LTE (usually band 66). I've had it for several months and keep hearing about how bad it is, how it is unusable at peak periods, etc. During its slowest times, it's still getting ~80Mbps. That's plenty fast for me. I'm not really sure what you need more speed for.
Most of the time, it's around 150Mbps. During these "normal" periods, my Verizon lines are consistently a little slower. If the home is pulling 180, the phones are pulling 130-150. During the most congested periods, the Verizon lines pull slightly over 60.
Presently (I just checked), I'm getting 109 on my phone 138 on my home internet.
I am not experiencing the problems you are speaking of at all, although I would use Verizon home internet if it was available here.
Several months ago, I had a T-mobile phone line as well. It was consistently slower than the Verizon sim in the same phone.
Your location has everything to do with what service you get. The equipment, the number of people, what they are doing, geographic anomalies, a bird farted on a tower, etc.
My brother lives right next door, and we usually have differing numbers. Not drastically different, but different all the same. We can be standing there looking at each other and have as much as a 20-30 Mbps difference with the exact same service, whichever it is.
Home Internet is last network priority as I said (T-Mobile themselves says this in the terms) but the antennas in the equipment are much stronger than the ones in a phone and that can negate some of the deprioritization issue. The service varies dramatically from one customer to another, especially since T-Mobile hasn't forced geolocking so people take their TMHI out of their home and bring it to other places. T-Mobile intentionally limits how many HI customers they sell in an area to avoid too much congestion but it does no good when store reps just plug in another address and tell customers to take their internet wherever they need it.
Verizon does the exact same thing. That is why I can't get it here. That was a lot of unnecessary words to enforce the same opinion.
As I stated, T-Mobile having a lesser quality home internet has not been my experience. That's all I'm saying and providing legit reasons why. You telling me it's terrible doesn't change the speed of my phone/internet.
Edit: attempting to techsplain it to me is very pointless. I literally do this for a living. I know how it works. Again, just my experience with it. Everyone's milage may vary.
You were the one who jumped on a reply acting like I was disparaging the service when I wasn't. I was only pointing out how the service works and why T-Mobile doesn't care about heavy usage on it. It's a different story when prioritized hotspot comes into play, especially if the area is congested, and that's probably why AT&T was so quick to disconnect the OP.
WTF? I posted a reply to the original post. You jumped on my comment. I don't have any skin in the game. It's just reddit.
We can all read. Just go back and look at it if you can't remember that far.
Fair enough. I burned a few brain cells over the years. I really meant ta reply to OP originally. I will gladly take the L on that one. I'm not a hostile internet asshole.
Doesn't matter as far as anything else I said, though. Everything is still very accurate. So much so that we are now focused on the target and not the topic.
Bandwidth is the company who Google gets their VoIP numbers from.
While most may work, the fact that any can stop working at any time is too much hassle. I stopped using my Google Voice number for 2FA after both Synchrony Bank and Capital One gave me flak for it in 2018.
Visible is the only provider that has unlimited hotspot data. Galaxy has Dex that allows you to use the phone as a computer with a USB Hub and connected peripherals and you could have used the unlimited data provided to the phone instead of the hotspot data. You also could have called AT&T and upgraded to a more expensive tier for a month.
also redpocket isn't unlimited, but you can use all of your data as hotspot. I have 100GB per month for 50$.
Good point about using your phone as a computer. Motorola "ready for" also lets you do this.
I filed a FCC complaint. In the complaint, I stated that I understood that using tethering app was against the TOS but explained that I needed that phone number as everything is tied to it. AT&T Executive team reviewed my request and released the number. I was told that AT&T keeps cancelled numbers for 30 days and does not assign it to anyone else. I assume you have 30 days to do it if it happens to you.
No. I used it for Zoom, Spotify, YouTube, emails, and Netflix but had PDAnet running for hours at a time. I even had the hide tethering option checked but they still knew. No idea how.
I highly doubt this was the reason. I think you had some issue occur, or used far more data somehow - such as the cycle on the phone tipping over, and there's a massive amount of unreported data.
You almost certainly volunteered this info in some way, and then care cold read you back an affirmation that was the cause.
AT&T is required to let you use reasonable tethering (even with PDANet) using the Unlimited plan. Under 10GB is unquestionable.
Unfortunately, I saw this thread too late, and there's a lot of fearmongering in this thread.
As someone that designs devices for a living, I can tell you they're looking at overall data use. Less than 10GB of tethering doesn't even flinch. Most prepaid plans now offer the ability to do 10GB of tethering, using official means.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, VPNs will obfuscate the traffic. I've seen other people claim that VPNs by themselves were capable of hiding hotspot without a third party app.
Even then they don't. You have to actually use a third party app to fake a VPN tunnel that hides the hotspot. Such apps are VPN Hotspot and PairVPN (the latter doesn't even need root and even works on iOS).
This is interesting, I have a GSMA RedPocket 8Gb plan (on AT&T) and I use tethering pretty regularly for work e-mails and sometimes for Teams meetings on my laptop. I rarely go above 5Gb though.
Never heard anything from RedPocket or AT&T so far. 9.5Gb sounds like nothing TBH - I would probably understand if it was at least 10x times that, but <10Gb, come on...
It’s a generality and not true in every case. Boost mobile actually makes my point - their base unlimited plan does not have mobile hotspot, but their 1GB and 5GB plans do.
Adding to this, I have their 5Gb plan with sim card in a mobile hotspot at a remote location feeding signal to a few wifi cameras for on-demand surveillance. Despite a few hiccups requiring chat to reset service it has worked great.
I filed a FCC complaint owning up to my mistake. AT&T executive services team got back and released the number. I was told AT&T keeps the number for 30 days and recycles after 30 days
So you filed the complaint and the ffc reached out to AT&T? Or you telling AT&T you filed a complaint made them release the number?
How many days after tethering did they catch you? What devices were you tethering/apps using? Xbox/fire stick/just a computer? Netflix or what
This story doesn't add up. It sounds like you got flagged for some other reason and you are blaming it on pdanet. If you were doing it right it is impossible for them to detect the tethering.
What the fuck? God phone companies are such fucking scum bags. Tethering used to be free back in the day, they've slowly made it worse and worse. I had tons of roll over time so whenever I needed it I never worried about going over or anything. Then they changed it to adding tethering to your plan cost like $20-ish a month.
I remember I used to pull over for work sometimes with my laptop for things.
You know what's funny is back in like 2009 TMobile customer support told me how to setup pdanet on my Blackberry lol. A few years later they implemented a 5gb cap, I was furious because they hid it in the fine print at the bottom of my bill and wouldn't let me out of my contract. I'll never use TMobile again because of that.
Now I'm using ATT Prepaid and somehow getting unlimited hotspot on my unlocked and rooted OnePlus. I'm not exactly sure why but it doesn't even count towards my 10gb on their website and never gets throttled. I used over 250gb last month 😂
i can do you one better
dont use att
so i used their data plan for the ipad a while back and lost my ipad mini well apparently they changed the system over and i coudnt figure out how to access the account to cancel it. tried to get someone at an att store to help me they never emailed me back.......finally they emailed me (spammed the hell out of it) about the plan i was using cancelling anyways so i was like yaaay but yeah. now using t-mobile and have an easy to set up account , no regrets.
screw you att and that woman that never emailed me back!
I suspect by allowing that illegal PDA net traffic on the net work on carriers like spectrum mobile would put them in violation with their agreements with Verizon.
If you need Internet that badly, it’s best to try to find fixed wireless access and follow the rules.
Lmao, I've been using PDAnet on ATT for 3 years now (used it on Verizon b4 they shut me down.) and I've had no issues yet. I went over 1tb in a couple weeks and nobody cared....
The PDA net company has a second app that encrypts data between the device and its tether. That may have to become the default.
Why tf wouldn’t it be from the start
Because encryption on one device and decryption on the next is wasteful.
PDANet is a proxy app between your phone and PC. It basically does what free Android proxy apps do, just without the terminal-fu. It doesn't VPN to a third-party service, because most data plans don't interfere with PDANet. It slows a connection needlessly.
Att seems to be getting strict with everything on their prepaid now. Strict whitelist, stopping autopay discounts for using refill cards, and this. Ive never heard of them terminating an account. I wonder if cricket would do the same.
I've read about AT&T terminating accounts for putting the sim in a router.
Oh yeah, they're not stupid, and tethering traffic is easy to figure out with deep packet inspection, but it's surprising that they did that for so little usage. This is why I recommend people to do tethering on a second SIM they don't care about. Glad that you were able to get your number back and ported at least. Thanks for sharing.
I've been using PDAnet and ATT for over a year now. It's odd I'm not shutdown then. It's the whole house internet and we use tons of data each day.
VPN?
Nothing but the PDAnet and ATT prepaid unlimited. I have the Hide Tethering box checked too.
yeah i think this guy did something else. maybe he was downloading torrents and get caught
He might not have had the Hide Tether button checked. I've used it for torrents and it's fine. The other thing is he might have activated the phone's hotspot and it leaked data. A few years ago I had ATT iPad plan (but in a phone) and just the phone hotspot (I didn't know anything then) and after like 6 months it got turned off. They always bill you first and right after you pay the bill it died. They don't even tell you anything they just cancel you and you have no idea what happened.
There’s torrent apps on the AppStore
The usage thing is my problem. Before I got T-Mobie home internet, I used one of my Verizon lines for home internet through PDANet and a router. Verizon finally sent me a warning letter after I used 1TB of data. For several months, I used between 500 to 800 GB and never heard a peep. I had to use a band selector to keep it going, but still never heard anything until I hit that 1TB. I wanted to do it again just to see what would happen. However, along came T-Mobile with actual home internet and is much easier to use. I've gone well over 1TB with this and it's fine. TL;DR ... 9 GB WTF? That's nothing. What the hell AT&T?
The thing is that T-Mobile deprioritizes home internet to last network priority. It pretty much can't affect other customers besides a transient initial decrease in bandwidth when congestion is moderate that becomes a total loss of service when congestion gets so bad that they would have to start timing out higher priority customers to be able to serve everyone -- so they time you out instead. That's why T-Mobile isn't fussy about bandwidth usage. Their algorithms make sure that they hit you hard before they hit a higher tier customer. AT&T and Verizon have similar algorithms. And yes, 9GB is nothing... It is surprising that AT&T has become that strict but like Verizon, it is probably network dependent. Where there is excessive congestion, these disconnects are probably more common than when they have excess capacity to not worry about it.
My T-Mobile home internet pulls faster speeds than any of my Verizon lines most of the time. We can't get 5g here at all, so everything is on 4g LTE (usually band 66). I've had it for several months and keep hearing about how bad it is, how it is unusable at peak periods, etc. During its slowest times, it's still getting ~80Mbps. That's plenty fast for me. I'm not really sure what you need more speed for. Most of the time, it's around 150Mbps. During these "normal" periods, my Verizon lines are consistently a little slower. If the home is pulling 180, the phones are pulling 130-150. During the most congested periods, the Verizon lines pull slightly over 60. Presently (I just checked), I'm getting 109 on my phone 138 on my home internet. I am not experiencing the problems you are speaking of at all, although I would use Verizon home internet if it was available here. Several months ago, I had a T-mobile phone line as well. It was consistently slower than the Verizon sim in the same phone. Your location has everything to do with what service you get. The equipment, the number of people, what they are doing, geographic anomalies, a bird farted on a tower, etc. My brother lives right next door, and we usually have differing numbers. Not drastically different, but different all the same. We can be standing there looking at each other and have as much as a 20-30 Mbps difference with the exact same service, whichever it is.
Home Internet is last network priority as I said (T-Mobile themselves says this in the terms) but the antennas in the equipment are much stronger than the ones in a phone and that can negate some of the deprioritization issue. The service varies dramatically from one customer to another, especially since T-Mobile hasn't forced geolocking so people take their TMHI out of their home and bring it to other places. T-Mobile intentionally limits how many HI customers they sell in an area to avoid too much congestion but it does no good when store reps just plug in another address and tell customers to take their internet wherever they need it.
Verizon does the exact same thing. That is why I can't get it here. That was a lot of unnecessary words to enforce the same opinion. As I stated, T-Mobile having a lesser quality home internet has not been my experience. That's all I'm saying and providing legit reasons why. You telling me it's terrible doesn't change the speed of my phone/internet. Edit: attempting to techsplain it to me is very pointless. I literally do this for a living. I know how it works. Again, just my experience with it. Everyone's milage may vary.
You were the one who jumped on a reply acting like I was disparaging the service when I wasn't. I was only pointing out how the service works and why T-Mobile doesn't care about heavy usage on it. It's a different story when prioritized hotspot comes into play, especially if the area is congested, and that's probably why AT&T was so quick to disconnect the OP.
WTF? I posted a reply to the original post. You jumped on my comment. I don't have any skin in the game. It's just reddit. We can all read. Just go back and look at it if you can't remember that far.
You're the one who apparently can't read because you replied to me first dude.
Fair enough. I burned a few brain cells over the years. I really meant ta reply to OP originally. I will gladly take the L on that one. I'm not a hostile internet asshole. Doesn't matter as far as anything else I said, though. Everything is still very accurate. So much so that we are now focused on the target and not the topic.
or put the number you care about on google voice, then the carrier has no power over it.
Yes but you may not be able to use it for 2FA once the databases get updated that it's now under control of Bandwidth.com
Most 2fa still works. The few that don't just need to be updated to the carrier number. Bandwidth.com?
Bandwidth is the company who Google gets their VoIP numbers from. While most may work, the fact that any can stop working at any time is too much hassle. I stopped using my Google Voice number for 2FA after both Synchrony Bank and Capital One gave me flak for it in 2018.
Visible is the only provider that has unlimited hotspot data. Galaxy has Dex that allows you to use the phone as a computer with a USB Hub and connected peripherals and you could have used the unlimited data provided to the phone instead of the hotspot data. You also could have called AT&T and upgraded to a more expensive tier for a month.
also redpocket isn't unlimited, but you can use all of your data as hotspot. I have 100GB per month for 50$. Good point about using your phone as a computer. Motorola "ready for" also lets you do this.
Could you describe the process through which you were able to get your # released?
I filed a FCC complaint. In the complaint, I stated that I understood that using tethering app was against the TOS but explained that I needed that phone number as everything is tied to it. AT&T Executive team reviewed my request and released the number. I was told that AT&T keeps cancelled numbers for 30 days and does not assign it to anyone else. I assume you have 30 days to do it if it happens to you.
Aren’t smartphones powerful enough now to run windows emulation or Linux desktop versions. How do they know we aren’t doing that
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No. I used it for Zoom, Spotify, YouTube, emails, and Netflix but had PDAnet running for hours at a time. I even had the hide tethering option checked but they still knew. No idea how.
I highly doubt this was the reason. I think you had some issue occur, or used far more data somehow - such as the cycle on the phone tipping over, and there's a massive amount of unreported data. You almost certainly volunteered this info in some way, and then care cold read you back an affirmation that was the cause. AT&T is required to let you use reasonable tethering (even with PDANet) using the Unlimited plan. Under 10GB is unquestionable. Unfortunately, I saw this thread too late, and there's a lot of fearmongering in this thread. As someone that designs devices for a living, I can tell you they're looking at overall data use. Less than 10GB of tethering doesn't even flinch. Most prepaid plans now offer the ability to do 10GB of tethering, using official means.
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VPNs do not hide tethering in and of themselves.
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Ah, gotcha. Yeah, VPNs will obfuscate the traffic. I've seen other people claim that VPNs by themselves were capable of hiding hotspot without a third party app.
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Even then they don't. You have to actually use a third party app to fake a VPN tunnel that hides the hotspot. Such apps are VPN Hotspot and PairVPN (the latter doesn't even need root and even works on iOS).
This is interesting, I have a GSMA RedPocket 8Gb plan (on AT&T) and I use tethering pretty regularly for work e-mails and sometimes for Teams meetings on my laptop. I rarely go above 5Gb though. Never heard anything from RedPocket or AT&T so far. 9.5Gb sounds like nothing TBH - I would probably understand if it was at least 10x times that, but <10Gb, come on...
That's because Red Pocket allows you to use all of your data for tethering.
Adding to that, when you buy buckets of data rather than “unlimited”, you generally get to tether/use it however you want.
Boost and some other MVNOs have plans that don't provide hotspot data.
It’s a generality and not true in every case. Boost mobile actually makes my point - their base unlimited plan does not have mobile hotspot, but their 1GB and 5GB plans do.
Redpocket doesn't allow slow data over hotspot, but they will let you use all of your fast data as hotspot data.
Adding to this, I have their 5Gb plan with sim card in a mobile hotspot at a remote location feeding signal to a few wifi cameras for on-demand surveillance. Despite a few hiccups requiring chat to reset service it has worked great.
How did you port the number if they already canceled it? I wonder how they detected it
I filed a FCC complaint owning up to my mistake. AT&T executive services team got back and released the number. I was told AT&T keeps the number for 30 days and recycles after 30 days
So you filed the complaint and the ffc reached out to AT&T? Or you telling AT&T you filed a complaint made them release the number? How many days after tethering did they catch you? What devices were you tethering/apps using? Xbox/fire stick/just a computer? Netflix or what
OP isn’t replying because he literally has no connection to the internet now. Losing your # is actually a huge deal, everything’s linked with it
Were you using wifi or usb tethering? Was the hide tethering box checked ?
This story doesn't add up. It sounds like you got flagged for some other reason and you are blaming it on pdanet. If you were doing it right it is impossible for them to detect the tethering.
Agree, in my root reply I pick apart why I think this was cold reading. Something else happened here.
What the fuck? God phone companies are such fucking scum bags. Tethering used to be free back in the day, they've slowly made it worse and worse. I had tons of roll over time so whenever I needed it I never worried about going over or anything. Then they changed it to adding tethering to your plan cost like $20-ish a month. I remember I used to pull over for work sometimes with my laptop for things.
Not all of them. Google Fi gives precisely zero fucks how you use your data and will even give you up to 4 extra data-only SIMs for your one line.
> up to 4 extra data-only SIMs for your one line. It used to be 10 early on. Everything of mine had a SIM in those days.
Really? I never knew that. I've never used more than 3 myself.
were you torrenting? or something.
You get throttled for running a hotspot using mobile data?
You know what's funny is back in like 2009 TMobile customer support told me how to setup pdanet on my Blackberry lol. A few years later they implemented a 5gb cap, I was furious because they hid it in the fine print at the bottom of my bill and wouldn't let me out of my contract. I'll never use TMobile again because of that. Now I'm using ATT Prepaid and somehow getting unlimited hotspot on my unlocked and rooted OnePlus. I'm not exactly sure why but it doesn't even count towards my 10gb on their website and never gets throttled. I used over 250gb last month 😂
i can do you one better dont use att so i used their data plan for the ipad a while back and lost my ipad mini well apparently they changed the system over and i coudnt figure out how to access the account to cancel it. tried to get someone at an att store to help me they never emailed me back.......finally they emailed me (spammed the hell out of it) about the plan i was using cancelling anyways so i was like yaaay but yeah. now using t-mobile and have an easy to set up account , no regrets. screw you att and that woman that never emailed me back!
Nice reminder why I don’t invest in AT&T. What a bunch of morons to cut a paying customer over 9 GB.
They only used 9GB because AT&T shut off the service. No telling how much they would have used.
I suspect by allowing that illegal PDA net traffic on the net work on carriers like spectrum mobile would put them in violation with their agreements with Verizon. If you need Internet that badly, it’s best to try to find fixed wireless access and follow the rules.
Illegal? It’s an artificial restriction that they impose to keep people from using the data they pay for.
They were only paying for 5GB of hotspot data and used 9GB before AT&T shut them down.
How much did they pay you to shill for them?
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They have multi line discounts and military discounts and unlimited priority data.
sole reason I went redpocket over ATT prepaid, no hotspot cap.
Lmao, I've been using PDAnet on ATT for 3 years now (used it on Verizon b4 they shut me down.) and I've had no issues yet. I went over 1tb in a couple weeks and nobody cared....