One of Canada’s claims to fame has been that we pay some of the highest prices for mobile service anywhere in the world. While that generally continues to be the case, in the last several years prices have begun to come down; and it’s even possible to score deals which are comparable to the rest of the world; shocking, I know.
One such deal came along that was a little too good for me to pass up – $25 monthly for 80GB of data which even included roaming to the US. Sign me up!
This particular offer was from Fido – a company that is wholly owned by Rogers Communications (one of the major incumbent telcos in Canada). The service operates as an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) under the Rogers network, so I expected service and coverage to essentially match the Rogers network, and for the first few days it did. Then, one Saturday morning it all went sideways when I tried to tether my laptop at a coffee shop which didn’t have WiFi!
I opened the settings app and activated the hotspot, same as I had done a hundred times before, connected my laptop and…. nothing. My VPN failed to connect, my browser failed to load and I couldn’t even ping anything beyond my cellphone.
Of course the first thing I tried was rebooting my phone, then resetting the mobile network settings, no dice. Time to do a bit of research.
Turns out, Fido made a quiet policy change to new plans – they explicitly prevent you from using your phone as a hotspot unless your purchase an additional addon. The addon was only $5/m, but the fact that it was even necessary enraged me!
Not being one to give up, I proceeded to look online for a solution, and found one Reddit post which implied that changing some of the phone’s APN settings shoudl re-enable hotspot use. The fix, is to add ‘DUN’ to the list of protocols under the default ltedata.apn or to change the APN entirely to ltetethering.apn. Unfortunately, Fido seems to block modifying APN settings, and my phone (A Samsung S10) wouldn’t let me change it without root privileges. Bastards!
I searched around, and did find a sketchy-looking app which allowed me to forcibly change my APN settings (without root), and using the settings from the Reddit post did allow me create a working hotspot, however, the changes seemed to randomly revert, and using the app in general felt really greasy.
My search continued, and I stumbled upon another solution – an app called PDANet+. The PDANet+ application has supposedly been around for ages – since before Smartphones allowed native hotspots, and it works differently then a traditional hotpsot. Rather then turning your phone into a router, PDANet+ uses WiFi direct to create a network, and then runs a proxy server, which you need to configure your browser to use in order to access the Internet. Because all the traffic originates from the phone itself, it’s invisible to the provider and is allowed on a standard LTE APN. Skeptical at first, I figured I didn’t have anything to loose and and low and behold… it worked!
Now, configuring my browser to use a manual proxy server is annoying, especially when I have to change it back while using a regular hotspot so I found another technical solution – use a VPN! Since I already run my own OpenVPN server to gain remote access to my management network, I figured I would also use it to punch out to the general Internet from my laptop. Turns out, OpenVPN (when configured in TCP mode) can use an HTTP proxy by adding a single line to the config file: http-proxy 192.168.80.1 3000; tested and it worked beautifully.
So, it was a bit of a struggle, but at least I now have full use of my phone again and can hotspot without needing to pay Fido an extortion charge. Is it annoying? Yes, but I put up with plenty of other annoying technical challenges and this I find to be one worth bearing.