I write about cell phones here, but I use them like a Boomer with a DVD clock flashing 12:00 – I bricked my last post paid phone ten years ago and was on prepaid flip phones for several years, till I had a work thing that demanded a smart phone. That’s long gone and I’m coming up on the five year anniversary of simply not even having a phone on me when I leave the house. If I’m going out of town I will take one, but it’s turned off at the bottom of my backpack.
That being said, I’ve had some networking revelations in the last month or two that I want to share.
The first is that hotspot is now apparently a must have feature even for entry level prepaid devices. This is surprising to me, because the last time I needed this service it was just stupid expensive. I have two devices with it now.
I got an iPhone a while ago, in order to be able to field questions on it. I heard about Visible’s $25/month plan with all you can eat hotspot and I had to try it. It does what it says on the tin, but it demands online payment, there are no prepaid cards for it, so it’s not a non-attrib wonder, it’s just been a handy backup, in addition to being a domestic IP that isn’t associated with my location.
Some new duties came up and I got an AT&T Calypso 3 with a $30/month plan. Amazingly this includes 16GB of high speed data and then the limit is a generous 1.5 mbits. Since it’s a true prepaid and I bought it with cash, any attribution effort is going to require access to carrier data. Read: no civil options, come back with a warrant. I’ve used 10% of the high speed data creating a new persona for some recent work, at that rate of use $30 will last me a month, and I doubt I’d even notice a 1.5 mbit cap. I’m not up to speed on it yet, but I think the card indicated that this lasted 90 days. If I wasn’t seeing things, that’s important for persona durability.
The networking changes also surprise me. I’ve tried tethering here and there over the years, the only thing that connected reliably for me was a Palm device, which tells you how long it’s been. I am marveling over how smooth this is with Linux now. No endless slog looking for drivers, no recompiling, literally NO CONFIG CHANGES. You plug the device in, enable tethering for either Android or IOS, and you’ll see a new ethernet device in the output from dmesg -w.
Prior to this month, if asked about this I’d have suggested a cash phone purchase, take it to a coffee shop, do the commissioning there, then a VPN provider with a U.S. exit to make whatever accounts you need. The VPN use is now the kiss of death. You need it to avoid the IP loggers of the world, but those actual free services, where monitoring your behavior is the product, are reducing noise by requiring a funded cell phone plan.
Overall I am pleased with conditions today. Spending $55/month isn’t a lot and the increased obstacles should in theory clean up the environment. They aren’t, but I think that’s the overseas angle. Actually needing $25 - $30/month to mess around online will shut out a lot of the small fish in the U.S., which is a good thing.
Cell Phone Hotspot & Tethering