“T‑Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T‑Mobile ONE plan.” That was the promise. The Un-contract. The whole reason millions of customers picked the magenta team over Verizon and AT&T in the first place. Now T-Mobile is retiring legacy 3G and 4G-era plans — Magenta, ONE, Simple Choice — and automatically moving customers onto “modern” 5G plans at higher monthly costs. Billing changes hit mid-July for the current wave. The company that swore it would never surprise you with a rate hike just sent the notification.
They do shit like this and get away with it because it’s slim pickings for a plan that has phone, internet, and most importantly no data cap. All carriers suck at one of those three.
I’m using Cricket wireless. $45/mo gets me unlimited internet on my phone with a 15gig hotspot.
I’m all physical media, but if I need to download something, I do it on my phone (sorry, seeders) and transfer it over to my PC to watch on my TV.
that sounds like a lot of hassle. why are you downloading on the phone?
The only hassle is the tranfer, and that’s set & forget.
And I don’t spend $50-100/mo (wifi + streaming)to waste time channel surfin.
you can share your phones internet connection (including wifi) with a computer over USB. you need to enable it on the phone. its cool I think. this way you could also be seeding.
on linux, with some distros you need to load a kernel module by hand. for some reason it does not load automatically on some of them. if you are interested I can look up my notes about it
Two things:
Sadly, my USB port completely borked, so that’s off the table. I use KDE-something-or-other to txfr files over my internetless wifi.
Second, I did look into it, and even on my Graphene OS phone, the USB tether is treated identically to the hot spot; that is to say, the carrier can detect you’re connecting a device and there is no workaround other than paying the cellular provider for the privilege of using your connection as they see fit.
there must be a workaround. I have been seeing solutions for this in the past, but I don’t remember because I haven’t had such a shitty provider.
probably it’s the TTL value in the packets. if you can move the sim card or a clone of it into a portable openwrt router, that’s an easy fix, otherwise it would probably need patching android which you probably can’t do because graphene is too hostile to that.
Lmao I’m amazed cricket still exists. I remember using their shitty USB internet sticks 15 years ago.
There’s a small profit to be made administering a plan on a common carrier while the bigger operators. rake in the big money from idiots permanently leasing a fucking cell phone.