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Top-level
 Thanks for the explanation. I had assumed the throttling happened in the phone, not the tower (or wherever in the phone carrier's network). I was very puzzled why TTL would matter. Personally, I just use Mint Mobile, which gives 5GB of high speed data per month for $15 with no restrictions. 5 comments
 @fencepost @nitpicking Yes, it apparently matters to some carriers, which seem to use the TTL as a lazy, easy way to restrict the use of their network to devices they (mostly) control.  @fencepost @nitpicking @briankrebs USB2 maxes out at 480Mbps, which I don't think is going to be the limiting factor here. (Also most tethering is probably happening via WiFi hotspot these days.) I've been using Mint Mobile for years. I love telling the Verizon or other sales person at Costco that I pay $15 per month and I just paid for a year. They leave me alone at that point.  @nitpicking @briankrebs Yeah. I appreciate the TTL explanation as I was initially think DNS TTL and going what the ferk? It's also exactly how one would expect a carrier to implement throttling. That is a lame implementation that sort-of, kinda, mostly works. A bit like the bandwidth limits on airport wifi that base it on the MAC address of your NIC. |
Gregory's Server
@nitpicking @briankrebs TTL doesn't really matter on a technical basis except that it's a very easy to detect attribute of data packets, one that the equipment is already looking at because it has to adjust it down by one before sending the packet along.
On the other hand if you're tethering via USB to a phone speed issues might be due to most phone USB ports only doing USB2 speeds.