I’m tethered right now. I’m on a Vodafone UK corporate contract – but I’m not in the UK. Vodafone previously did not permit tethering on our contract. This might have been at our request in order to limit data roaming charges. The personal hotspot switch on the iPhone was disabled (after an over-the-air SIM update), but 12 months ago that changed and now it’s all ok.
What I reported is either a deal between Vodafone and AT, or AT doing the deep packet inspection on GSM traffic they are carrying for Vodafone on their own.
The thing is called deep packet inspection. There are a number of vendors for tools that are used on networks where some sort of traffic shaping / control is desired. That includes blocking access to unwanted content as eg China does. You would be surprised what is possible.
I’ve seen a bit of that stuff but the vendors obviously don’t like to talk about or have someone talking.
The best way to avoid the hassle is to have a proper contract with the full feature set. It might be a bit more expensive but avoids all the tinkering and trouble.
I have unrestricted roaming but evidently it does not prevent someone in the middle screwing around with the traffic.
Salamanca, Oct 2014, FTP was blocked by the locals.
A VPN gets around all this but it needs to be a pure port 443 one. No other ports and no UDP. I have this (Softether) on my win xp laptop but the android clients run ipsec and this works less well.
Every phone company I asked about it in the past told me that “while they don’t like it”, they can’t do much about it. It’s only four days ago that Vodafone told me that on the phone when i changed my contract.
These companies either lie outright or (far more usually) the customer interface staff haven’t got a clue how somebody’s particular account has been configured. Especially Vodafone with whom I have way more “experience” than I ever wished for, and they are the best UK company for general quality of service (arguably, of course; there are always locations where XYZ works better).
But as I said a couple of times I don’t think this is anything to do with Vodafone. In the UK and most places I have been to, they absolutely allow tethering.
In this case it is the local network blocking the traffic. It is either acting on its own or acting as a result of failing to reach an agreement with Vodafone on the extent of the service.
The reason I am posting this apparent nonsense is that us pilots are now totally dependent on the internet for just about everything to do with flying. The only exception is very local “grass roots” flying. So one needs more than one way to do the job.
