iPhone 14 Pro Cancelled my broadband and been using 14 Pro as a hotspot for months.

[eyoungren]

I was thinking about using my old iPhone as a permanently plugged into mains hotspot behind my airport router. That way battery life or warm mess is not an issue. With everything running through router (Mac, Apple TV, digera hub for ikea lights, I would hope it won’t idle.

Tried this a bit with unplugged iPhone and it never idled until I left house.

Going to have to test more.

I would think the only hitch you'd run into here is that iDevices that sit on charger for extended periods of time tend to have their batteries swell. At least that has happened with two iPhone 5s that I own (5, not the 5 's') and one iPhone 4s.

 

[Ghost31]

Interesting. I’m at home and tried switching off wifi and doing a speed test. That’s about as fast as my home internet. Tempted to try hotspotting my ps5 and see how well it works. OP, how’s gaming on it? Connection good?

 

[waquzy]

Interesting. I’m at home and tried switching off wifi and doing a speed test. That’s about as fast as my home internet. Tempted to try hotspotting my ps5 and see how well it works. OP, how’s gaming on it? Connection good?

It’s sound mate, no issues whatsoever.
Here’s my full results:

 

[eyoungren]

It’s sound mate, no issues whatsoever.
Here’s my full results: View attachment 2207656

You beat me on upload, but my wired package is only for 35mbps upload.

 

[akidd]

But does it allow you into fixed isp registration?

 

[Ghost31]

My carrier does “unlimited” but reduced speeds after 20 gigs. After that you can’t really stream anything

 

[waquzy]

My carrier does “unlimited” but reduced speeds after 20 gigs. After that you can’t really stream anything

That’s a joke. It has to be truly unlimited, not fake “unlimited”
Your carrier is misleading customers! I hate when they do that, like read the small print etc

 

[startergo]

That’s a joke. It has to be truly unlimited, not fake “unlimited”
Your carrier is misleading customers! I hate when they do that, like read the small print etc

That is what is offered in the states. There is no true unlimited.

 

[eyoungren]

That is what is offered in the states. There is no true unlimited.

I blame Sprint.

They were the first carrier to introduce 'unlimited'. Then when customers took them at their word, they came out and said 'No, we meant unlimited data on your device!'

And then later on they said, 'Uh, sorry, what we really meant was X amount of data at full speed and then unlimited at 300kbps after that'.

Customers took Sprint literally and it was Sprint's own stupidity that misunderstood what would happen.

Now we have *unlimited.

*-qualifiers

 

[waquzy]

That is what is offered in the states. There is no true unlimited.

That’s lame.

 

[unchecked]

Just chipping in. Pretty sure my country isn’t the only doing this but in Singapore we have fair use limits. Regardless of the plan, if it’s a 300GB or unlimited plan, the telcos would impose a 10GB daily data limit on each mobile line to prevent us from hogging mobile bandwidth.

So say that I need data like 30GB to live stream events for the entire day, I would need three mobile lines and swap out a SIM every 3~4 hours.

In a way we don’t have true “unlimited” either.

 

[Surfsalot]

Our house uses 1TB a month, ain't going to work here.

 

[saudor]

Usually 1 hr of hotspotting = 10% of battery charge. The phone gets reasonably hot but nothing major. I’ve been running it for 3 months, battery health is still at 100% btw. Phone is 3 months old.

Running telly, laptop and PS5 simultaneously

That's probably why. I find these things dont drop too dramatically until about a year in. Then it drops a ton (to low 90s) and then stays relatively stable before it starts dropping faster again. YMMV though.

Going back to the thread, this is not an option for anyone outside of the UK or other smaller countries where cell coverage is not extensive. In canada for instance, we have a bunch of frozen ice that we still need coast to coast cell coverage, so the rest of us in cities pay through the roof to support all that.

 

[magicMac]

Three UK network is a beast these days. I get 100MHz 5G carrier almost everywhere I go now, often hitting 300-600Mbps like the OP.

If you’re on SMARTY you can get unlimited data for £18/month too !
https://i.smarty.co.uk/18mhtAx

 

[DigitalAR]

Ive been doing this since the iPhone 4 days.

10 years ago was tethering a few hundred gigs a month and now am doing about just shy of a terabyte per month.

This is the one main reason, the unlimited mobile data hotspot, that I always buy my iPhones outright so I can keep my stellar 15 year old unlimited data plan

 

[mcled53]

Just thought I would share my experience regarding this. I decided to cancel my broadband provider full stop and I have been using my iPhone 14 Pro as a hotspot through mobile 5G.

I used to be with TalkTalk and their max download speed was 65MB, whereas my mobile provider on 5G, I usually get 500+MB download speeds. I’m with Three. I’m on an unlimited data, £17 a month.

TalkTalk was £25 a month. So that’s a nice bit of saving there.

Here are some stats: View attachment 2207466 View attachment 2207467

It's people like you in the US that caused US carriers to discontinue true unlimited hotspoting. 5% of the users were using 9o% of the bandwidth so here in the US the made unlimited not really.

 

[Apple2501]

Countries outside the us are smaller and regulated. Never gonna happen in the good ol usa inc. there’s honestly no incentive and companies pay big bucks to lobbyists to cry foul until laws against cheaper internet get passed. Then they sneak regulations in some other law on page 1246 para 2 line 3. In other words… never gonna happen. Internet is always going to be expensive.

 

[haruhiko]

The comparison between 5G network (above) and the home internet - it’s always the upload speed.

 

[jchap]

Before we switched over, we called up Spectrum to see if they were willing to lower the price of their service. They weren't. Too bad. We went with T-Mobile and trialled them (we had like 30 days free or something like that). After using it for a little over a week and being blown away by it, we called up Spectrum to say we're cancelling. THAT'S when they were trying to keep us by saying they'll reduce their monthly service charge, etc. etc. Too bad, so sad. We're not returning. LOL.

It's amazing how the telecommunications business works this way, with all their scheming and withholding discounts and eventually begging... it really pays for the consumer to be wary and check out all the options.

 

[michaelsviews]

Just thought I would share my experience regarding this. I decided to cancel my broadband provider full stop and I have been using my iPhone 14 Pro as a hotspot through mobile 5G.

I used to be with TalkTalk and their max download speed was 65MB, whereas my mobile provider on 5G, I usually get 500+MB download speeds. I’m with Three. I’m on an unlimited data, £17 a month.

TalkTalk was £25 a month. So that’s a nice bit of saving there.

Here are some stats: View attachment 2207466 View attachment 2207467

Carrier? And City, State?

 

[waquzy]

Carrier? And City, State?

Carrier - Three UK
City/county - Leicestershire
Country - United Kingdom
Gender - male
Age - 39
Relationship status - single
Children - 1

 

[leifp]

Canada: Hold my beer.

I will NOT like your post… I’m actually debating getting a European phone package for use in Canada! My business partner has that and he has significant cost savings plus more flexible cell access (even worse, I actually live in a place where I do not have cell service in my house… replacing Musknet is not on, sadly)

 

[jlc1978]

As noted in another post, I use T-Mobile home internet which is essentially a hotspot. We consistently get 206Mbps download and 27Mpbs upload. I don't know if that's fast enough for you, but that's way way faster then the cable internet service we got (although we did choose the lowest tier for cable internet). True, 5G hotspot speed might not be fast enough for some, but I think for the typical household it should be more than enough.

My household doesn't do gaming. We do have an AppleTV, 3 iPads, 2 iPhones, 2 Mac computers, and 2 Apple Watches.

I also use TMob in the US. The first time I tried it it didn't get a good signal, but their newer modem with I suspect upgraded towers works great. Not as fast as my 1GB fiber, but fast enough for a setup like yours and 1/4 the price.

I Europe, I have an eSim on my phone and simply buy an unlimited data plan while there.

As a Network Technician I can assure you a hard line is absolutely stable compared to Mobile data. Now you may have had issues with your area’s broadband network, I couldn’t say, but I can again assure you mobile data is not consistent on speeds nor latency purely due to the fact it is wireless and shared by thousands on the same tower.

Very true, but it comes down to what you need and the value for the money. If I was uploading lots of stuff, I'd have a high speed hard line. For me, cell data is good enough, and as for value I now get, for the previous price of internet access, access and the streaming services I buy each month.

The only downside is slower upload speeds, but I can live with an email taking 3 or 10x to time to send.

YMMV

That’s a joke. It has to be truly unlimited, not fake “unlimited”
Your carrier is misleading customers!

Which is why carriers tout "Unlimited data," not "Unlimited high speed data."

You do get unlimited data, just not different speeds. I'd love unlimited 5G data on my phone, but it simply isn't practical for carriers to offer it do to bandwidth limitations. Prioritizing data is needed to efficiently use the network; and if carriers offered unlimited high speed data people would complain about its performance because of how people would use it. Just like electricity, you'd see peaks at certain parts of the day when everyone started streaming after work, weekends, etc., resulting in congestion, buffering and complaints. Building out towers to handle peaks would be expensive and in many areas where you'd need more towers NIMBY would prevent it.

I suspect one reason TMob offers it and cheaply is they have no hard line service so any customers likely are leaving their telco competitors; giving them an opportunity to get their cell service switched as well.

I hate when they do that, like read the small print etc

However, when you sign a contract the small print is what counts.

 

[msackey]

As a Network Technician I can assure you a hard line is absolutely stable compared to Mobile data. Now you may have had issues with your area’s broadband network, I couldn’t say, but I can again assure you mobile data is not consistent on speeds nor latency purely due to the fact it is wireless and shared by thousands on the same tower.

Very true, but it comes down to what you need and the value for the money. If I was uploading lots of stuff, I'd have a high speed hard line. For me, cell data is good enough, and as for value I now get, for the previous price of internet access, access and the streaming services I buy each month.

The only downside is slower upload speeds, but I can live with an email taking 3 or 10x to time to send.

YMMV

So it is true that overall, a hard line will be more stable than mobile connection. If we live in a theoretical world, then yes, there are much less environmental factors that would disturb a hard line than mobile connection which is affected by weather, physical blockages, and so forth.

But no one lives in the overall or absolutes.

We all live in specific individual cases.

We had Spectrum broadband cable (whatever their lowest tier is) and the connection was fast enough for us and pretty reliable until the past two months when it started being unreliable especially a few times at night and then in the middle of the night. You might think, who cares when it's unstable in the middle of the night, right? Well, I'm an insomniac and I do use the internet in the middle of the night

Our T-Mobile connection is much faster both upstream and downstream and also so far has been very stable in terms of user perception. And, it is also cheaper than Spectrum broadband.

As @jlc978, YMMV and also depending on what you need, T-Mobile home internet may be sufficient.

We live in an area where we do get 5G connection and very stable. When we had Spectrum, there were times when we had outages and I'd have my laptop connect to the phone via hotspot and continue on with my video zoom meeting with no slow downs.

 

[msackey]

My carrier does “unlimited” but reduced speeds after 20 gigs. After that you can’t really stream anything

:-(

I found out that 20Gb is not enough for us. Luckily there's no such limit for T-Mobile home internet. Before using T-Mobile home internet, I had no idea how much internet data we use. I didn't think we are particularly heavy users because neither my husband nor I do anything beyond stream videos (that's mostly him), watch some YouTube, and browse on the internet (like newspapers, comment boards and stuff like that). Turns out last month we used 420Gb and that was a typical month. Well, I guess we both do some video conference too...