Bypass tethering caps or throttling on cell phone unlimited data plans. Potentially cancel your internet and route your whole home though your unlimited data plan.
Inspired from XDA forum threads. Working Options for Unlimited Tetherting, Hotspot, Carrier Check Bypass Methods Unlimited WiFi Tethering
- Unlimited data plan
- Ability to hotspot your phone
- Computer or Router
This is not a carrier specific method, I use Verizon but this should generally work with any carrier. It also doesn't matter if they throttle or cap you at 15GB or something, that is what we are about to work around.
If you are going to go the router method it will be a lot more work but the router will handle all the traffic routing and you can just connect any device in your house to your router and it will just work. If you are just going to use your PC then you can generally have this running in ~15 to 30 minutes.
I have personally used anywhere from 80-150GB of data with this method consistantly for 6+ months and never been throttled one time while my traffic was going through the tunnel.
- Download Termux app, install openssh on it, make sure you have python2 as well and simlink the
python2
command topython
.
pkg install python2
py2_path=$(which python2)
py_path=${py2_path%/*}/python
ln -s "$py2_path" "$py_path"
-
Configure authentication as explained here for SSH. If you don't already have a keypair it explains how to set up an ssh keypair and use it to authenticate to your phone from a PC. I personally used my existing SSH public key and made a folder / file
~/.ssh/authorized_keys
on Termux and dropped it in there with something likecurl "https://github.com/rifi2k.keys" > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
if you already have your public keys on github here. -
Hotspot your phone.
-
Run
ifconfig
inside Termux to get your current tethering local IP. It will be the only 192.x.x.x spit out and generally for andriod will be ending in 192.x.43.x. Save this. -
Run
sshd -dD
inside Termux which starts an openssh server in debug mode to audit traffic. Your looking to see something like this as output from the above command.
debug1: Bind to port 8022 on ::.
Server listening on :: port 8022.
debug1: Bind to port 8022 on 0.0.0.0.
Server listening on 0.0.0.0 port 8022.
-
Now pop onto a PC and connect it to your hotspot.
-
Now SSH tunnel all the traffic from the device back through the openssh server your running on the Termux app. Now that you are on the same local network you can SSH tunnel into our saved IP address and port from earlier
192.x.43.x:8022
or similar.
You can use ssh which would look something like this.
If you want to use OpenSSH on Windows my recommendation would be Chocolatey package manager. https://gitlab.com/DarwinJS/ChocoPackages/tree/master/openssh
TERMUX_USER="u0_a249"
TERMUX_IP="192.x.43.x"
TERMUX_PORT="8022"
LOCAL_SOCKS_PORT="8123"
ssh -D $LOCAL_SOCKS_PORT -fqgN $TERMUX_USER@$TERMUX_IP -p $TERMUX_PORT
TERMUX_USER would be your username on the Termux app.
TERMUX_IP would be the IP you got from ifconfig
in Termux.
TERMUX_PORT would be the port sshd
is using in Termux.
LOCAL_SOCKS_PORT would be the port you want to use for your local proxy.
So then once you run the above ssh command you need to configure a system wide or application specific Socks Proxy which would be proxying all traffic to 127.0.0.1
for the Socks Host and whatever LOCAL_SOCKS_PORT
is from above for the Socks Port.
I use sshuttle which already handles most of the gotchas with tcp over tcp etc. and which also has a solution for Windows and linux. Also sshuttle generally handles setting up the Socks Proxy for you. A command for sshuttle might look like this.
TERMUX_USER="u0_a249"
TERMUX_IP="192.x.43.x"
TERMUX_PORT="8022"
sshuttle -r $TERMUX_USER@$TERMUX_IP:$TERMUX_PORT 0/0 --exclude $hostname 0/0
On Windows I would download Virtualbox. You can verify the sha256 of the files via PowerShell with Get-FileHash C:\path\to\file.exe
. Also you might want to use git bash instead. Then you want to make sure you launch a linux VM in bridged mode.
Then run sshuttle inside the VM following the directions here for sshuttle in a VM.
Inside the VM
sshuttle -l 0.0.0.0 -x 10.0.0.0/8 -x 192.168.0.0/16 0/0
Back on your Windows machine, assuming your VM has the IP 192.168.1.200
on the bridged network.
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.200
That should route traffic through the VM and the tunnel.
As long as you make sure all your traffic passes through the tunnel it 100 percent shows that all your internet is being used by Termux app not your hotspot app so you need no other spoofing of hops or anything because to your phone and carrier you are just using a bunch of data in termux, you do it right you will never be throttled.
Anyone can feel free to contribute any working method or enhancement to this method. If anyone wants to help with the router stuff have at it. Just open up a pull request.
Issues or enhancement requests should go here.