[Poll] LTE Tablet vs Tether off phone?

cough

unlocked bootloader, root, iptables, shell script

cough

Can I get you a throat lozenge, Nigel? :wink:

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I got a deal on a Samsung Tab S a few years ago when my wife an I got our Samsung S6 edges. The tablet had its own number and was part of our data planā€¦ I think we actually used LTE on it less than 5 times within the past 3 years. I primarily used it on WiFi or downloaded games and videos on to it to use on plane rides. We had to pay $10 a month for the extra ā€œlineā€ on our account that I was not allowed to cancel for 2 years. I actually forgot about it and literally just cancelled the extra line on it a week ago cause we never used it on LTE.

I closed the poll. Interesting discussion, thanks.

The results in the end tally roughly with my anecdotal experience, I see a small number who have an LTE tablet, some who dont have tablet but majority who go with Wifi and tether off the phone.

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So you paid $240 for data. Thatā€™s a typical tablet cost. So doubled the cost.

LTE hardware is not much $, so I could easily have an LTE tablet, it is the network costs which are prohibitive. The puzzle is why the carrier charges so much. If I had a SIM and LTE tablet, Iā€™d be largely moving demand from my phone to my tablet, so the total usage is the same, so the load on the carrier in the network is the same, so logically the carrier should make tablet SIMs and lines nearly free. But they do the exact opposite. Weird. Why?

Depends if your allowed to tether from your mobile plan.

I could never lock into 2 Gb, always haggle for best plan I can get. Currently have a 20GB a month plan for 2 people and am mulling the switch to unlimited.

Wow! Very cool dude!

i find that these LTE tablets are very useful but donā€™t see why you canā€™t just pair it off your phone

Some cellular data plans donā€™t allow tethering to other devicesā€¦unless you pay an additional charge for this ā€œfeatureā€.

In my case (as I mentioned above), Verizon throttles the data down to 600kbps when tethering on their basic ā€œUnlimitedā€ plan unless you opt (pay more of course) for a different plan. 600kbps is OK for web surfing/Googling/etc but trying to download something is an exercise in frustration.

Just think, we use to download with dialup. Oh how Iā€™m glad times have changed, no more waiting a day to download 1 song:joy:

I remember back in the day of dial-up.

Orange have free phone numbers for free! So me n my 5110 Nokia, would run AOL on my desktop, with my handset as my modem n dial-up.

It went ok, so long as a good signal.

Remember when laptops were for weightlifters? I had mobile internet. Hahaha a four seater table in maccies and just me n my laptop (you didnā€™t dare rest it.on your lap tho) n Nokia 5110

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That is one of the reasons I do not got for unlimited. When you buy limited you buy a certain GBytes and so expect it. When you buy unlimited youā€™re in effect buying nothing. And you pay more. I am visiting UK shortly and I checked with a local PAYG provider, unlimited does throttle tethering, limited does not.

I had that weird conversation with T-Mobile and could not see a conclusion beneficial to unlimited. I just buy devices like tablets with SD card and put 128GB in and have oooooooodles of videos so never need to go above my data limit.

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I was there too.

I also remember before VPNs were invented and you had to ring your corporateā€™s dial-up modem national non-local number rather than your local ISPā€™s number. I was part of the initial Demon Internet tenner/month launch and had a local call number (thinks: Manchester?). But I still paid like 130 quid / month in about 1995-ish.

The 2018 equivalent is say Giffgaff, free calls to free number.

Now this sounds all expensive and antiquanted but what what this did was:

  • get me exposed to the Internet before 99% were aware of the Internet. It was actually back then called usually Usenet, or DARPANet due to the protocols.
  • got me skilled up in now commodity but then scarce skills
  • tripled my pay

Think for example the early 1990ā€™s access to technology. The journalist would hear of something, write it up, it would become printed and shipped and youā€™d go into say WH Smith and buy a computer magazine, and usually youā€™re talking 1 month delay. Imagine the 2018 version of immediate information, live streaming.

So that expensive phone line gave me a return. But I didnā€™t know that at the time. The lesson learned was to not see costs but see opportunities.

Iā€™ve yet to know the future as I have not invented it yet.

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Arrrrr Dial Up Internet. They were the days. I was a lot later to the party but me and the Mrs used to be online for hours playing Party Poker lol before you could get apps for everything and your mobile was just for ringing and texting.

Every night 10pm the free roll would start and by 12 I was knackered and needed kip but if you were down to the last few You obviously had to try and win :grin:

I got 2nd a few times out of 2000 or so but never won. Loved it though. Gotta love the Internet

Ah, I canā€™t say I miss the modem screeching from the dial-up daysā€¦ or someone else picking up the phone and kicking me off AOL! :joy:

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I had to drill a hole for the 3 phone lines, one for voice, one for internet, one for fax.

Screwdriver required to install the faxmodem and get 9600bps , expressed as 0.0009 Mbits or 0.07% of typical cellular data speeds.

Networking was not part of Windows yet, so you had to install a TCP/IP stack.

As your dial-up was expensive, youā€™d have an off-line newsfeed reader to dial-up, download, hang-up.

I had a roomy 116MB harddrive, or about 0.09% of a typical modern PC.

Then you had also Cello for your browser, as Netscapeā€™s memory footprint too big, and Internet Explorer didnā€™t exist yet, and Astalavista as Google didnā€™t exist yet. Also used Archie

That and having to live inside a windmill to make electricity (this part is joking) but it was proper hardwork 25 years ago that if you did manage to get online there were only geeks there.

Remember Ram being sold for about $600 for 2Mb 16Gb would have cost $4.8 million :sunglasses:

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I paid Ā£160 for 4MB so I had 8MB to then boot Slackware Linux, which came on about 30 floppies from someone at a University who had ā€œproperā€ Internet.

Every Kbyte was precious, on my 25Mhz PC. I couldnā€™t afford the 33Mhz DX, only the 386 25Mhz SX

I did manage to make a dual-boot Windows 3.1 / Slackware with a shared swap partition.