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Re: [LUG] TCP/IP through phone

 

On Sat, 24 Dec 2011, tom wrote:

On 24/12/11 09:14, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Sat, 24 Dec 2011, Rob Beard wrote:

Probably worth checking with your provider though to see if they allow tethering.

From what I gather, they all say you can't tether unless you buy a
suitable contract that specifically allows it... However, again, from what I gather, none of them does anything about it. Data is data. They can tell if a phone is being tethered (unless you go out of your way to spoof browser headers, but then they need to DPI check for them anyway)

It's a complete anachronism these days and the mobile companies should get over it and just sell data as data without caring what it's connected to. My android phone is fully capable of sucking/sending as much data on its own as a laptop 'tethered' to it.

Images *are* compressed though - all the mobile operators intercept web browsing, force proxy you and compress images. It's a rather novel method and is normally unobtrusive on small devices. You'll see references to 1.2.3.4 as you're browsing...

So if you want true, un-intercepted data then you need to VPN out.

Gordon

Re proxy compression - this was used by a few ISP's for dial up - I think proxying stopped PDQ though but compression made life better and for certain stuff the improvement was 10 fold! I wish people would use it today - nonXML - XML compression is a doddle and makes some documents almost disappear!

Once the V.<whtever) the last modem standard (the 56K one) came in, it supported compression natively - which really helped, but it wasn't able to compress already compressed data - such as JPGs - unless something external compresses them to a lower quality.

However for web servers there's probably no excuse to not support gzip natively - all the browsers do, so stuff like xml, and other text such as javascripts ought to be tranfered compressed - however with faster links the trade-off over compression time vs. cpu usage vs. link transit time is becoming blurry...

Some ISPs still proxy - Virgin do, I think, or did until very recently (BICBW) The mobile hotspot I'm working on compresses and force caches but bandwidth in that situation is both scarce and expensive...

Gordon

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