Nexus 4 Wi-Fi Hotspot

SumthinMynur

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I used to have a NexusOne and it had a feature built-in when 2.3 was released to turn into a Wi-Fi Hotspot which was really awesome. Anyone know if the Nexus 4 has the same feature?

I have been reading that FoxFi does not function on JellyBean at the moment.
 

Mac58

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So I'm guessing there is no need to add the extra $15 onto your T-Mobile plan? That is great!

You can if you want to fork over that cash :)
BUT if you buy the device unlocked, or even through tmobile, I would assume that tmobile can not prevent the fre wifif hotspot feature since its baked into android and they have no control over the OS. Actually this will be really interesting. I was planning on buying the unlocked one either way, but I am wondering for those who buy on contract if they will automatically receive the wifi hotspot since tmobile shouldnt be able to restrict it...
 

eco7

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At the moment I'm using my old N97 with pre-pay - $50.00 plan with I will downgrade to $30.00 cause I don't need unlimited talk time. I can manage with 100 minutes. I'm using N97 to log in with my laptop and the software from Nokia. But sometimes T-Mobile squeeze their web-pages telling me to buy a hot-spot.

just for info :cool:
 

zorak950

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Carriers are getting better at detecting tethering use. You can certainly try to get away with it, but I've heard reports of people getting cut off or automatically signed up for a tethering plan. All hearsay of course, but bear in mind the possibility if you attempt to cheat.
 

Shadowriver

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Carriers are getting better at detecting tethering use. You can certainly try to get away with it, but I've heard reports of people getting cut off or automatically signed up for a tethering plan. All hearsay of course, but bear in mind the possibility if you attempt to cheat.

Hmmmm, assuming that user have phone untouched by carrier, they might detect it by gathering by detecting network traffic to services that specific mobile phone should not have, for example Android phone accessing iTunes or if the spy you data deeply they can check user-agent header of browser.
 

SumthinMynur

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The way I see it is if I have unlimited data I have every right to use it how I deem necessary and if my service provider is monitoring my activity and snatching up packets and then wants to complain to me that I am violating my service agreement I am happy to take my business to another carrier since I have an unlocked device. Their actively reviewing my usage in that kind of manner is a disturbing invasion of privacy.

From my experience when I had my NexusOne is I used a lot of data and never was hounded by T-Mobile over my usage.

The reality is when you pass data over any service whether browsing, streaming, email or file sharing you can often see within the packets what OS is being used, what browser or email client, ports. It is quite simple to monitor but these days it is just as easy to spoof. Say if are a web developer you often have to spoof your browser types to see how they render. So there is often valid cause and reason to see a number different types of the above mentioned from any type of user.
 

eco7

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@( The way I see it is if I have unlimited data I have every right to use it how I deem necessary ) + 1 - My phone is unlock from Nokia and is German version.....In Germany you are allow to use it with Bluetooth, Usb or the software that every provider provides the user to use to be able to use ther Cellular as a hotspot. This is all new to me. I have only 2 weeks in Florida. :cool:
 

skiptomylou

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unfortunately, tmobile can and will do their best to detect "unauthorized" wifi hotspot traffic, and block you.

I got my MyTouch 4G in Feb 2011 and used the built-in wifi hotspot for over a year. Sometime this summer I got a text message from t-mo saying I was about to be blocked, and a couple days later I was -- the hotspot wouldn't work anymore. I complained and a support rep said I could always download an app like PDANet that provided mobile tethering. I did that, worked OK, but a couple months later I found that any HTTPS connection -- including google.com -- wouldn't work on my connected laptop, would just time out. I called t-mo and they did something to fix it, but a week later the problem was back again and an hour later I got a text from t-mo saying i should upgrade to hotspot service or some traffic would be blocked. I called t-mo again and they confirmed that I needed to purchase the hotspot service. they said their technology was catching up with their policies so they were better able to find and block people who were using other hotspot services. I wasn't using much data, just checking email and web surfing from a laptop here and there.
 

mattatwar1

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unfortunately, tmobile can and will do their best to detect "unauthorized" wifi hotspot traffic, and block you.

I got my MyTouch 4G in Feb 2011 and used the built-in wifi hotspot for over a year. Sometime this summer I got a text message from t-mo saying I was about to be blocked, and a couple days later I was -- the hotspot wouldn't work anymore. I complained and a support rep said I could always download an app like PDANet that provided mobile tethering. I did that, worked OK, but a couple months later I found that any HTTPS connection -- including google.com -- wouldn't work on my connected laptop, would just time out. I called t-mo and they did something to fix it, but a week later the problem was back again and an hour later I got a text from t-mo saying i should upgrade to hotspot service or some traffic would be blocked. I called t-mo again and they confirmed that I needed to purchase the hotspot service. they said their technology was catching up with their policies so they were better able to find and block people who were using other hotspot services. I wasn't using much data, just checking email and web surfing from a laptop here and there.

The nexus 4 is pure android the carrier does not have any tracking stuff on it so it would be Harder for the carrier to see usage of the WiFi hotspot feature, but they may be getting smarter with detection



Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums
 

dan1431

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To Be Absolutely Clear, my understanding comes from anecdotal evidence from multiple sources including here, XDA and other places devoted to the wireless industry. My understanding does not come from any official sources, so please take my following statements with a grain of salt.

If your phone was branded by a mobile carrier (i.e. Sold directly from the carrier) than tethering is far trickery as the mobile carrier has in most cases developed ways to easily and accurately determine and block tethering directly on the handset itself.

If your handset is unbranded (i.e. not sold directly by the mobile provider and not modified by the mobile provider in any way) than the mobile provider has a much tougher time to detect/prevent tethering as they have to rely on other means to detect tethering.

So, what does that mean for a Nexus 4? Well, as it is not branded in any way, than the mobile providers have to use those "unknown methods" to detect tethering and at least in my case my mobile provider has not done anything to me yet and I have been tethering since my N1.

Dan
 
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zkSharks

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Carriers have the ability to analyze all data being routed through your device, including when it's acting as a hotspot. There are some rather simple potential indicators of tethering usage, such as user agent strings, that can identify data being requested by devices other than your phone. I'm currently tethered off of my Galaxy Nexus, and when I load a webpage, my user agent is the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.91 Safari/537.11

The user agent is not the only information provided with an HTTP request. Look through the HTTP request header fields for more information.

The two main reasons why you may be able to use your hotspot without the proper plan are because 1) you have not reached certain hotspot data usage levels/data usage types to constitute a warning or restriction, and 2) the carrier's current systems do not look for -- or are not capable of looking for -- your type of hotspot usage. For a period last year, Verizon's systems would flag unauthorized hotspot usage based on data upload statistics. Then, they employed specific monitoring systems for activities such as online gaming (think Xbox LIVE, not Words With Friends) and torrenting. Occasional minor hotspot usage was not a primary concern, as hotspot awareness wasn't as widespread as it is now.

For phones sold directly from a carrier, there may be software such as the infamous Carrier IQ installed. This is how unauthorized usage would be detected and reported client-side.

Edit: I should mention that it isn't necessarily as straightforward as I might make it seem -- it isn't always easy for the carriers to detect hotspot usage, per se.
 

N4Newbie

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To Be Absolutely Clear, my understanding comes from anecdotal evidence from multiple sources including here, XDA and other places devoted to the wireless industry. My understanding does not come from any official sources, so please take my following statements with a grain of salt.

If your phone was branded by a mobile carrier (i.e. Sold directly from the carrier) than tethering is far trickery to tether because the mobile carrier has in most cases developed ways to easily and accurately determine and block tethering directly on the handset itself.

If your handset is unbranded (i.e. not sold directly by the mobile provider and not modified by the mobile provider in any way) than the mobile provider has a much tougher time to detect/prevent tethering as they have to rely on other means to detect tethering.

So, what does that mean for a Nexus 4? Well, as it is not branded in any way, than the mobile providers have to use those "unknown methods" to detect tethering and at least in my case my mobile provider has not done anything to me yet and I have been tethering since my N1.

Dan

I think you are correct. With my (former) Sprint-branded device, I could not even turn on hotspot capability without a message popping up asking if I wanted to sign up for Sprint hotspot service. If I said no, hotspot would turn on only for ad-hoc networking of local devices; essentially useless. There was no way around this (to my knowledge) other than to root the phone.

OTOH, with a non-branded device, T-Mobile would have to monitor ALL network traffic in order to catch the relatively small number of people who are using non-branded devices in hotspot mode. This seems like overkill to me.

Reminds me of when home internet access via POTS (modem), then cable, then DSL, were first available and all the providers said that you could not use the connection with more than one computer. This worked until routers (wired and ultimately Wi-Fi) came down to reasonable prices; once you could have hundreds of devices of all kinds behind a router and it was essentially impossible for the provider to know if you were connecting one hundred PCs to their service or a single (albeit, very busy!) PC, they all but gave up and eventually began providing routers with their service.
 

Citizen Coyote

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Carriers have the ability to analyze all data being routed through your device, including when it's acting as a hotspot. There are some rather simple potential indicators of tethering usage, such as user agent strings, that can identify data being requested by devices other than your phone. I'm currently tethered off of my Galaxy Nexus, and when I load a webpage, my user agent is the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.91 Safari/537.11

The user agent is not the only information provided with an HTTP request. Look through the HTTP request header fields for more information.

The two main reasons why you may be able to use your hotspot without the proper plan are because 1) you have not reached certain hotspot data usage levels/data usage types to constitute a warning or restriction, and 2) the carrier's current systems do not look for -- or are not capable of looking for -- your type of hotspot usage. For a period last year, Verizon's systems would flag unauthorized hotspot usage based on data upload statistics. Then, they employed specific monitoring systems for activities such as online gaming (think Xbox LIVE, not Words With Friends) and torrenting. Occasional minor hotspot usage was not a primary concern, as hotspot awareness wasn't as widespread as it is now.

For phones sold directly from a carrier, there may be software such as the infamous Carrier IQ installed. This is how unauthorized usage would be detected and reported client-side.

Edit: I should mention that it isn't necessarily as straightforward as I might make it seem -- it isn't always easy for the carriers to detect hotspot usage, per se.

This. Even for unbranded unlocked phones, carriers have ways of detecting hotspot or otherwise "abnormal" usage by looking at the traffic moving through their servers. Some won't do anything about it until it becomes a problem (torrenting, using up tons of bandwidth, etc) while others will flag your account no matter what you were doing and take action if they detect similar activity again. If you're not willing to pony up for the extra hotspot cost and still want to tether, my best advice is to keep it on the down-low. Only use it when necessary and limit your activities to low impact stuff like checking email or simple web browsing.
 

minnemike

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Carriers have the ability to analyze all data being routed through your device, including when it's acting as a hotspot. There are some rather simple potential indicators of tethering usage, such as user agent strings, that can identify data being requested by devices other than your phone. I'm currently tethered off of my Galaxy Nexus, and when I load a webpage, my user agent is the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.91 Safari/537.11

The user agent is not the only information provided with an HTTP request. Look through the HTTP request header fields for more information.

The two main reasons why you may be able to use your hotspot without the proper plan are because 1) you have not reached certain hotspot data usage levels/data usage types to constitute a warning or restriction, and 2) the carrier's current systems do not look for -- or are not capable of looking for -- your type of hotspot usage. For a period last year, Verizon's systems would flag unauthorized hotspot usage based on data upload statistics. Then, they employed specific monitoring systems for activities such as online gaming (think Xbox LIVE, not Words With Friends) and torrenting. Occasional minor hotspot usage was not a primary concern, as hotspot awareness wasn't as widespread as it is now.

For phones sold directly from a carrier, there may be software such as the infamous Carrier IQ installed. This is how unauthorized usage would be detected and reported client-side.

Edit: I should mention that it isn't necessarily as straightforward as I might make it seem -- it isn't always easy for the carriers to detect hotspot usage, per se.

Nailed it.

As far as the user agent method to identify your type of usage, if you tether a tablet running android, you are probably still looking like a cell phone on the network. If you want to use a laptop, make sure you use something that can modify your user agent string- I think firefox has a plug in for that.
 

N4Newbie

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This. Even for unbranded unlocked phones, carriers have ways of detecting hotspot or otherwise "abnormal" usage by looking at the traffic moving through their servers. Some won't do anything about it until it becomes a problem (torrenting, using up tons of bandwidth, etc) while others will flag your account no matter what you were doing and take action if they detect similar activity again. If you're not willing to pony up for the extra hotspot cost and still want to tether, my best advice is to keep it on the down-low. Only use it when necessary and limit your activities to low impact stuff like checking email or simple web browsing.

But, what is the point??

If my plan offers me 5 GB per month at "full" speed and then drops off to 2G speeds, what difference does/should it make to the carrier how I use my allotment, how quickly I use it, or what I use it for?

I think this is exactly why nearly all carriers are moving to capped data service in some form or another. Their ability to maintain control and/or limit device-specific usage is rapidly declining as the number of users and amount of data increases and, besides, there is always the risk of courts and or regulators stepping in and saying what I said above: 5 GB is 5 GB and it should not matter to anyone how I choose to distribute that amongst my devices.
 

zkSharks

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I think you are correct. With my (former) Sprint-branded device, I could not even turn on hotspot capability without a message popping up asking if I wanted to sign up for Sprint hotspot service. If I said no, hotspot would turn on only for ad-hoc networking of local devices; essentially useless. There was no way around this (to my knowledge) other than to root the phone.

Exactly right, and this is because the stock version of Android for that device included a layer of authentication/service checks before bridging the local hotspot network to the mobile data network. User-developed ROMs would not contain this authentication measure.

OTOH, with a non-branded device, T-Mobile would have to monitor ALL network traffic in order to catch the relatively small number of people who are using non-branded devices in hotspot mode. This seems like overkill to me.

Not necessarily true. Continuing from my previous post, the HTTP header fields are transmitted in plaintext. HTTP headers can be rather easily located in HTTP request-response pairs because of this.
 

N4Newbie

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Furthermore, the carriers would have a better argument for disallowing hotspot (unless paid for separately) if they were still providing unlimited service to the cell phones. Cell phone usage has natural limits imposed by the convenience of using the device itself for "big data" tasks.

Unlimited data AND uncontrolled hotspots would be a big problem for carriers. However, as soon as you impose data caps, there is no longer any significant reason to piss off users (and possibly regulators) by imposing separate fees for hotspotting.