using tethering (wireless hotspot) as ISP?

[Mike Small]

Hi,

I've been experimenting at home this past week using my phone as my sole
internet connection under a Simple Prepay plan with T-Mobile, which has
a 4 GB limit before it drops to "3G". I didn't have high expectations
and t-mobile did not exceed those expectations. But given how much and
how I use the internet I can't justify paying $40/mth for an additional
full internet connection from RCN. Near 1Mbit/s with some dropped
packets but not full service outages lasting hours (hi comcast) is all I
think I need, and t-mobile's quite degraded hotspot connections seems so
far to at least offer that much.

I'm going to give it another week or two before dropping RCN and will
probably hold on to my cable modem 6 mths after that. But does anyone
have any experience using hotspot/tethering as your ISP? Did you
encounter any show stoppers as opposed to only having very slow
internet?

The main issues I've had so far are that they seem perhaps to thottle
bittorrent in particular and definitely keep all downloads down around
90KB/s with only an occasional burst up to 500KB/s or so. Secondly,
traceroute at times shows dropped icmp packets and very high latency,
often in t-mobile's hosts but also quite a bit at a level3 host. (If
there are any free/open source software people here, I've also had an
issue opening remote files under emacs using tramp, in that emacs just
seems to hang -- I figure this is tramp's fault or maybe there are
timeouts I can adjust to adapt to the poor connection quality -- if need
be I might be able to look into using sshfs to see if it behaves
better.)

There's a nice reddit thread from a couple years ago speculating about
how t-mobile goes about prioritizing and possibly throttling traffic,
but I'm not 100% feeling their conclusions fit my observations:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/342wr7/tmobile_is_now_throttling_unlimited_data/
E.g. are more of their problems at the local tower level (kind of fits
my situation maybe: urban, near a university, in an apartment building
with many students) as some commenters suggest there, or is there
something in the nature of t-mobile's agreements with level3 going on in
addition? Anyone have any good information on what t-mobile does or is
dealing with that causes the poor performance? Would it be better to do
this with Sprint, since they supposedly have a lot more network
infrastructure. Well, that would be assuming they have any plans as
cheap with limits I can deal with and that they've finally started
letting you use whatever phone you have rather than making you lease
one.

I'm also curious if using bittorrent at all is a violation of t-mobile's
terms of service. I've read them and don't think the way I use
bittorrent violates their terms. The relevant clause has to do with
negatively affecting their network with excessive bandwith use. For one
thing I can't seed since I don't have access to whatever router has the
non-private IP. Secondly the sum of my bittorrenting is typically two
250 MiB creative commons licensed news programs a week. I don't see
myself torrenting down more than 3GB a month. So, I'm a gentler
bandwidth user than anyone who watches movies on his or her phone. And
then whatever t-mobile does to their hotspot connections has me down
under 100KB/s most of the time besides.

--
Mike Small
sma...@sdf.org