
T-Mobile CEO to users hiding their hotspot tethering activities: “It's over.” - atomical
http://www.zdnet.com/article/t-mobile-ceo-to-hackers-stealing-hotspot-data-its-over/
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brandon272
I always find it amusing when these issues come up and people need to remind
us all that "UNLIMITED SHOULD MEAN UNLIMITED!" ... I've always assumed it was
common sense that "unlimited" is essentially a marketing buzzword.

No network is capable of offering "unlimited" service to all customers. It
means they aren't going to enforce draconian caps on every day usage. It's to
give the typical user the reassurance that they have nothing to worry about in
terms of overage. It's not to provide people with 2TB a month of transfer.

Frankly, I find using 2TB a month on an "unlimited" plan to be abusive and
disrespectful to other customers. These networks obviously have real limits
and capacities. Clearly abusing an "unlimited" plan does little but encourage
service providers to enforce data caps and overage fees.

~~~
userbinator
_These networks obviously have real limits and capacities._

There are only real limits in terms of bandwidth, and not the quantity of data
transferred.

~~~
snuxoll
You are 100% right. Unfortunately, due to the way wireless spectrum works you
have no choice but to oversubscribe available bandwidth in the hopes that not
every user is using their devices at once. While they suck for a consumer,
limits on total data transferred allow wireless providers to allow users the
ability to use their devices but limit the _amount of time_ they are consuming
available bandwidth.

------
duaneb
The idea that data can fundamentally change based on how it's viewed, legally,
is absurd. I hope this trend passes quickly.

~~~
snuxoll
> The idea that data can fundamentally changed based on how it's viewed,
> legally, is absurd.

Data itself doesn't change, usage patterns do, and that is why restrictions
like this exist. My internet connection at home is a reasonably fat 75/5Mbps
'business-class' pipe, I'm paying for a service that expects pretty high usage
and the infrastructure is designed to handle it - the coaxial cable going to
my house has enough bandwidth and so does the fiber going from the local cable
node back to the big datacenter where my traffic eventually gets routed to the
rest of the internet.

Mobile has an extremely annoying limitation in that we can't just run a cable
to every phone, we want stuff to happen wirelessly! Well, since there's no
wires providing service every user has to in essence share the same bandwidth
coming from a cell site. We can make sure there's plenty of fiber going to
each site, but physically 10Mhz of spectrum can only provide so much
bandwidth, and that is a huge limiting factor of wireless service.

Your 3-6" smartphone has very different usage patterns compared to my 13"
ultrabook. You may watch a couple youtube videos, stream some music, maybe
even watch a movie on Netflix - but you are unlikely to do so for extended
periods of time or on a frequent basis, the usage is very sporadic and lends
itself well to sharing with other users.

Usage on a tethered laptop or other device is very different, I'm sitting down
right now connected to my work VPN 'getting stuff done', checking email,
moving large files around, downloading an update for Visual Studio, the list
goes on. And this is not something that I do for 10 minutes or even an hour,
this is my entire work-day, and I regularly use 10's of Gigabytes of data,
something our limited wireless spectrum is not well suited to handle for a
large amount of users (that's what WiFi is for!).

Unless nationwide we are going to turn a large enough block of wireless
spectrum into a national wireless ISP (we're talking probably 100-200Mhz) we
simply do not have enough bandwidth over the airwaves to support people with
these usage patterns.

~~~
duaneb
This strikes me as preemptive optimization. That's a lot of argument to back
up, though I think it has merit.

I would feel much more comfortable with straight up metered internet,
variably-priced based on current congestion. I would feel much more inclined
to believe you if it didn't look like the service providers were trying to
change the meaning of internet access—it shouldn't matter which kind of device
is "plugged in". That's just terrible service.

~~~
chc
In what way is it possibly beneficial to me as a user to have metered Internet
for all cases rather than unlimited for most cases and metered for others?

~~~
duaneb
Because, when I look around, I don't see internet being offered at a e.g. per
GB rate. So I don't think your dichotomy is correct; I think people WOULD look
quite favorably on metered tethered data with up-front costs as opposed to a
cap with hidden metered fees or retroactive fines.

However, even if it WERE correct, I much prefer to think of internet as a
service. It is incredibly frustrating to deal with tiers that are only slowly
approaching the reality _they use to defend the tiers themselves_. I'm very
open to the idea that bandwidth might be a dominating restriction, but the
optimal way to deal with it would be a) transparency and b) incentivizing
avoiding congestion. However, I'm afraid to tether my computer and actually
take advantage of the service I'm paying for since the tools are horrible to
actually figure out what the costs might be or how to avoid them.

~~~
chc
T-Mobile offers apps with up-to-the-minute accounting of your usage, and at
least with me, they were quite explicit about how everything is priced. It
doesn't seem that hard or scary to me, and I've never gotten "shock" bills
from them.

------
drivingmenuts
Seems to me that T-Mobile should not be able to tell me how I use my device.
The device-to-device connect (hotspot) occurs on my hardware and doesn't
involve them. The data usage is _all_ mobile usage after that, since it's
coming thru my phone.

Now, T-Mobile may object to certain kinds of traffic (torrents, etc.) but that
opens up a whole different can of worms. If the high-volume data consumers are
_actually_ causing a problem for other users, then T-Mobile probably should
consider expanding their bandwidth with new equipment.

Trying to squirm away from the term "unlimited" because of a few inconvenient
users with inconvenient bits, however, is just weaselly as hell _and_ avoiding
the real issue.

~~~
chc
If it seems to you that T-Mobile should not be able to tell you how you use
your device, then it seems to me that you should not sign a contract granting
T-Mobile that permission.

~~~
brandon272
Consumers never look at that side of the equation. They don't read their
contracts, they don't do their due diligence. They just blame the company and
claim the role of victim when something doesn't work out in their favour or
when the company does things like ask people to not abuse the network.

~~~
teacup50
The party with more resources has the advantage -- information and power
asymmetry falls in their favor.

 _Of course_ consumers don't "do their due diligence", because they'd have to
do so 1000s of times a day. This is a large part of why we have consumer
protection laws in the first place.

~~~
brandon272
I don't sign 2 year cell phone contracts "1000's of times a day" and when I do
sign them I read them because they're really not that long. And if I don't
read them and something doesn't work out in my favour I don't pretend it's the
phone company's fault.

Consumer protection laws do not remove all responsibility from the consumer to
be aware of what they are getting into.

~~~
teacup50
What percentage of consumers do you think are capable of reading contract
language accurately, assessing risk/value, judging things like how much
bandwidth they use, doing what, and how that may increase or decrease?

Likewise, how many lawyers working for cell phone companies are capable of
reading contract language accurately? How capable do you think cell phone
companies are at projecting data utilization based on the huge trove of
customer data they have available to them?

Requiring honesty around simple terms like "unlimited" helps level that
playing field, at least in some small way.

------
doki_pen
I don't think it would hurt their business to say something like :

    
    
       120GB of data (compared to verizon's 12GB)
    

If they are being honest and really are only worried about people using 2TB,
then this should solve the problem completely.

120GB would be unlimited for 99.99% of users.

~~~
gkanapathy
They actually do say "unlimited phone, and 7GB tethering". It's very explicit,
and limited tethering is a specific part of the "unlimited phone" plans. And
as the article says, if you want more tethering, you are able to add and pay
for that separately. The issue is people bypassing the tethering limitations.

------
roddux
This is the reason that I always take a very sceptical view on mobile
contracts that offer "unlimited" data.

I wonder if they'll be allowed to continue calling it "unlimited" here in the
UK after this revelation.

~~~
DanBC
ASA ruled that unlimited doesn't mean unlimited and can be used in adverts
when referring to limited plans.

[https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Hot-
Topics/~/media/Fil...](https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Hot-
Topics/~/media/Files/ASA/Hot%20Topics/Broadband%20hot%20topic.ashx)

All you can do is keep sending complaints and encourage others to keep sending
complaints. They do, apparently, occasionally take notice of complaints.

------
briantakita
Labeling people as thieves is manipulative & hypocritical when the marketing
literature claims "unlimited" data.

All TMobile needs to do is tell the truth & have a reasonable plan for high
bandwidth customers. Instead they treat these customers like criminals & turn
into the data gestapo.

In the meantime, TMobile seems to be quite profitable.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-raises-subscriber-
growt...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-raises-subscriber-growth-
outlook-1438257047)

------
joezydeco
Wait - so TMO monitors your data usage and throttles you down when you exceed
your cap on a _phone_ , but doesn't do this for hotspots and trusts the
hotspot to police the data cap?

~~~
StavrosK
No, I think the phone sends a certain bit to their servers when you're
tethering, to say "this data is from tethering", and they only allow a certain
cap for that. These "omg hackers" found a way to prevent that bit from being
sent, forcing the carrier to make good on their promise of "unlimited data",
which the carrier doesn't want to do.

~~~
mmcclure
> forcing the carrier to make good on their promise of "unlimited data"

I'm on the fence about what I think about the announcement itself (because of
the implications around enforcement), but this is a pretty untenable argument
if you want to get into "promises", or, who's really breaking their contract.

Contractually, the promise is unlimited data _without_ tethering. Explicitly.
If we want to talk about who's breaking what promises by rooting phones to
bypass tethering data limits, it's actually the "omg hackers".

~~~
StavrosK
How do they know it's people tethering? How do they know it's not someone just
doing all their downloading on the phone and then transferring it to the
computer or whatnot?

The only clue they have that these people were tethering was that they used 2
TB, but they may just as well have been watching a lot of Netflix on their
tablet.

~~~
jsnell
> The only clue they have that these people were tethering was that they used
> 2 TB

That's not true, and it's kind of uncharitable of you to assign malice and
technical incompetence to T-Mobile. There can be all kinds of differences in
the tethered traffic patterns vs. native phone traffic. For example:

\- Differences in IP TTL of packets

\- Differences in TCP options, advertised windows, and so on

\- Differences in packet ordering / RTTs (if you've got interleaved TCP flows
one which is terminated at the phone and one which isn't, you'd see the
terminated packets being acknowledged sooner)

\- Differences in the application layer data (for example the user agent
field)

The people who are camouflaging their tethering would of course try to apply
countermeasures against as many things as possible. But if they miss one kind
of fingerprint, it could be used to detect the tethering. That'd be the case
if it's a signal that'd be hard to deal with by a realtime automated system,
but requires some kind of expensive offline analysis.

------
mrrrgn
I noticed that when I hit my tethering cap, and start seeing an upsell page,
my Linux vms can still access content like normal. Seems that they do all of
their fancy tracking via user agent strings and consider Linux browsers as
being smart phones.

If true, it means that Linux users might end up getting accused of being ToS
breaking "hackers." Beware.

~~~
iotku
I wouldn't be surprised if how these "Hackers" were getting around the data
limits was far from sophisticated.

I've ended up getting around somewhat similar restrictions accidentally due to
poor implementations.

------
NovaS1X
Can someone clarify this for me (still haven't finished my coffee yet): If
T-Mobile is offering "Unlimited Mobile Hotspot" data as a part of their plans
then how exactly is this stealing?

~~~
JohnTHaller
They don't advertise unlimited hot spot. They advertise unlimited data for
your mobile device and 6gb of hot spot data. Some users are cheating and
masking their hot spot data used by multiple PCs and sometimes servers to get
around the 6gb limit without having to pay for the additional hot spot data.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
You actually don't have to do any masking, it just works. It's not like your
phone tells T-Mobile's servers when you start tethering, or they can detect
tethering through DPI. It all looks the same to them. So when they accuse
customers of "cheating" because they neglected to obey a hidden clause in a
contract they didn't read, it comes across as insulting.

~~~
ryan-c
Android's built in tethering absolutely does explicitly tell T-Mobile you're
using it. [http://danielpocock.com/android-betrays-tethering-
data](http://danielpocock.com/android-betrays-tethering-data)

