I have unlimited cellular data on my phone but not if I use it as a hotspot.

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 853 points –

What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook? Data is data.

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It’s to stop people from abusing unlimited data on their cellphone for all their WiFi devices at home. I know a person who did not have WiFi at home and only used their cellphone data. You are using more than a typical cellphone user and also you are cutting them from an opportunity to sell you a WiFi plan for your home. It’s annoying, but as I understand it, this is the reason.

The concept of abusing unlimited data makes no sense.

It’s unlimited data for your phone and not for all the devices you can connect to. I agree with your sentiment. Just trying to point what the companies have in their ToS. I will be glad to hotspot to all my devices from my phone and not pay for WiFi.

This might not apply everywhere, but I live in a rural area and actually most of my Internet used is through cell networks. When there are a lot of people in the area for some reason, I'm much more likely to lose service completely for web and calls.

I don't think that a reliable network is the reason why communications companies are limiting people's data, I think they're doing it for profit, but it could be a rationale to do so. It's not unreasonable to think that there can't be "unlimited" anything without some kind of impact.

But isn't limiting an unlimited service a form of false advertising? I'm sure they'd argue that a ToS was signed, but I don't know that you can legally bind people to accept a false advertisement.

Yeah you don't have to make that point to me. I'm just saying there could be a legitimate reason to want to make service limits. Obviously, if they really wanted to limit service to prevent network outages, I wouldn't be getting network outages 😂😭

You are using more than a typical cell phone user

But it still costs the ISP effectively nothing to send those 1s and 0s. This is like complaining about someone having a bunch of fans on because they're using more air than the average person.

I never implied that. Ask the ISP why they have separate hotspot / tablet / watch plans.