Carrier Verizon Personal Hotspot using Start Unlimited plan

[Phantom Gremlin]

To save money I recently switched all phones in my family to the Verizon "Start Unlimited" plan. That plan does not include use of a personal hotspot. I tried it anyway.

I can still connect my Macbook Pro to my iPhone 7 using the Personal Hotspot feature. Both WiFi and USB tethering work. But that's it. Packets from my Macbook can't get past the phone.

It's something that would be interesting to do, but it's not really that important to me. After all the intent was to save money, I'm saving $10/mo per phone times 4 lines.

I read somewhere else (posted a few years ago) that the personal hotspot would continue to work at low speed, 600kbps, unofficially. I guess that Verizon got smart and closed that loophole.

Does anybody know of any workarounds? The only thing I can think of is "mix and match" of plans, which Verizon offers. I can keep one or more of the phones active on a more expensive unlimited plan that does support personal hotspot.

 

[planteater]

I use the Verizon plan that includes hotspot, so I haven’t tried it, but perhaps a VPN connection on the phone would work. It’s worth a try.

 

[now i see it]

Find an old iPhone that's still running iOS 9. It'll do what you want.
Other than that, only one phone needs to be on a more expensive legitimate personal hotspot plan. The other devices can then connect to the Internet through it.

 

[Phantom Gremlin]

This is proving somewhat difficult to do, there will be lots of boring details here, mostly in case other people stumble on this thread. They will know what doesn't work!

1) use VPN. Not a bad idea, if I can send *all* traffic from the iPhone directly to a VPN, Verizon might not be able to determine the origin. I will let everyone know if I succeed.

2) IOS 9. Another good idea. Unfortunately that's a really old version. I have a rant below as to my problems with my old iPhone, but I'm sure that will bore most people here.

3) What I really want, and I suppose what IOS 9 does, is to run a permissive SOCKS proxy server or HTTP proxy server directly on the iPhone itself. I need to see if I can find an app for either of these. The main problem with what I find via search is that everyone assumes I want to send my iPhone traffic to an external proxy server. That's not what I want, I want to run the proxy server directly on my iPhone. But maybe this is similar to the VPN idea. If I can send all my traffic to an external server, Verizon might not be able to determine the origin.

1+2+3) If IOS itself is behaving differently depending on the origin of the traffic, it's more difficult to work around. I'm assuming that the iPhone simply forwards packets and that it is Verizon that is doing the blocking. E.g. some networks in the past simply used the TTL field in an IP packet to determine if the packet originated at that device or if it was forwarded by the device.

4) I know I can run more expensive plans on some phones. But that gets into family "politics". If one kid gets a more expensive plan and the other kid doesn't, that is not a path I'm ready to take, because the hotspot plan also has "Premium Network Access". So who is the Golden Child who gets that?

5) I wonder how often I can switch plans on Verizon? If I need hotspot access for a few days every few months, can I just switch to the more expensive plan for a few days?

6) As mentioned above, following are my problems with trying to use my old iPhone 5.

I power up the iPhone and see it's on IOS 10. Before I could do much else, a message pops up and says "Update Completed. Your iPhone was updated successfully. There are just a few more steps to follow and then you're done".

So somehow my iPhone "updated" (via cellular?), even though the SIM in it isn't on any plan. Perhaps it was updating its cellular network settings, and it doesn't need a plan for that? The iPhone didn't know my current Wi-Fi password so I don't think it used Wi-Fi.

Now the phone is demanding to be activated!!! I've owned this phone for 8.5 years, it worked fine the last time I powered it up. But no more.

Apple has disabled my 8.5 year old phone. Sucks for me to be the peon in this power dynamic!

As an alternative to Wi-Fi, the iPhone is telling me to connect via USB to iTunes. If I connect to iTunes, and after I again "activate" my bought-and-paid-for phone, I wonder if I can downgrade to IOS 9 via iTunes? I'm still running El Capitan on my Mac Pro. So it has an older version of iTunes. Those older versions were more capable than the current neutered software. So maybe iTunes will allow me to restore to an old image I saved?

 

[yticolev]

Now the phone is demanding to be activated!!! I've owned this phone for 8.5 years, it worked fine the last time I powered it up. But no more.

Take the SIM card out.

I don't think a prior version of iTunes will work on your current MacOS. Pity as iTunes is literally less functional/harder to use for me for my music library with each update for the last 12 or so years. Had to update my MacOS on my 12" MacBook for the first time and I had forgotten that each new iPhone (or iOS - my first for the last 5 years) requires updating iTunes if you want to restore your iPhone. I could do the iCloud route I suppose to future proof my older MacOS (only update when forced like with my iPhone Mini to save hundreds of dollars updating other software) - but then I still cannot manage my iPhone playlists from iTunes. No doubt this is great for security, but I hate, hate updates. You never know what they will break. I'm still running PowerPC apps on an iMac on Snow Leopard!

Please let us know if a VPN works for you and I'll learn how to use one on my own iPhone. While I have an older Verizon plan (each new plan costs more for less for my usage) with 600kps unlimited hotspot, it would be fun to get full speed.

 

[Phantom Gremlin]

Okay, I got things working. I can access the Internet from my laptop thru my iPhone, even though my Verizon wireless plan doesn't support that. But it's complicated, not for casual use.

First off, let me discuss one other thing I previously ranted about. My old iPhone 5 was asking to "activate". I still haven't done so. But I think it's because I may have "find my phone" enabled on it. When that happens the phone won't do anything after a reboot?. Someone above said to take SIM out. But that doesn't work. It says: "No SIM Card Installed. Insert a valid SIM with no PIN lock to activate iPhone."

Now, here's now to get to the internet:

There's a guy who wanted to do exactly what I wanted. So he did 99% of the work. Here is his info: https://github.com/nneonneo/iOS-SOCKS-Server

Here is a summary of what I did, following his instructions:

1) Buy, $10, an iOS app called Pythonista. It is a full Python interpreter.

2) Download the guy's iOS SOCKS server. It is a Python program. This is not a client, it is an actual iOS server. That is important. Most searches turn up how to connect from the phone as a client to an external SOCKS server elsewhere.

3) I tried to download the files on my laptop, then copy to iCloud drive, so that they could be accessed by my iPhone. That is a royal cluster ****. I haven't figured out how to force the movement of files from the laptop to iCloud. It is very unpredictable as to how quickly are visible to the iPhone. In my case, some were visible others weren't.

4) I wound up downloading the guy's server files directly, using the iPhone. That way all files were there. The files then need to be moved to a "Pythonista 3" directory. That's a little confusing. This was my first time using Pythonista and I'm still not sure of how all the magic directories and stuff get created.

5) Before you run the guy's server, you need to switch your laptop to "create network" under the WiFi icon. This makes a local WiFi network.

6) connect your iPhone WiFi to the network you just created.

7) When the guy's SOCKS server starts up, it will tell you the IP address and port that it is using.

8) Go into Firefox Preferences, under Network Settings you can manually configure it to use a SOCKS proxy running on the iPhone (see previous instruction, the proxy tells you what address to use).

9) DNS wasn't working. I could browse to numeric IP addresses such as 1.1.1.1, but not yahoo.com. Turns out there is a checkbox in Firefox at the bottom of that proxy configuration. You must check "Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5".

10) It works. I was seeing 20 mbps download using speedtest.net under Firefox.

11) The only program that works is Firefox. Nothing else. The guy tells you how to modify your System Preferences / Network so that all programs, not just Firefox, can use the proxy. I didn't bother to try that because I don't need to use any other programs.

Edit:
12) Just a warning. The "create network" step above creates a totally open WiFi network. I don't see a way to put a password on it. There may be safer ways to get the laptop and the phone to talk to each other. Bluetooth perhaps?