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Is Metro finally blocking wifi tether? (update: YES!)

Last week, I was driving across town and had my son with me. He was using our ipod (it was a Christmas gift to our family) and asked if he could tether. I set it up and he had no problems accessing the web over his wifi and my 3G connection.
 
3g isnt being filtered by metro i can confirm this with friend's phone since speeds on it is around 100-150 kbps which isnt any worries for metro.
 
Are the numbskulls at Metro back up to their old tricks? I'm having some issues today browsing from Opera on the PC. I had allowed Opera to update at some point, thus overwriting my custom DLL, but it seemed to still be working until just a little while ago. Checked Firefox (which has user agent switcher installed and set to Android) and still no joy. Funny thing is, I can browse from my Nook Tablet just fine. In fact, I am posting this from it now. I'm in the Tampa market.

Anyone else having issues this AM?
 
nope for me also in the tampa bay area carrolwood village to be exact ive been tethering alot more lately on 4g seems metro isnt filter 4g for me anymore but i have a few friends on the admire and their 3g is being blocked if they dont change user agent on browser.
 
Seems like I sounded the alarm a little too early. I'm posting this now from stock Opera (no user agent modifications) from PC. Maybe their DNS servers were just down or something earlier (earlier today when I had the problem, I could sync data, email worked, just not browse the web). Now it's working again though.
 
TRS-80 said:
Seems like I sounded the alarm a little too early. I'm posting this now from stock Opera (no user agent modifications) from PC. Maybe their DNS servers were just down or something earlier (earlier today when I had the problem, I could sync data, email worked, just not browse the web). Now it's working again though.
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barnacle still seems to be working for me, i've had more success with that compared to tether for ROOT users.

But with both there still is the occasional strange down time where i cannot connect to a few different sites, actually it's not all that occasional it's fairly frequent.

oakland county, michigan.
 
I am in the Bay Area and have had no problem with Easy tether. I will return to this thread tomorrow with the results of a Speed Test
 
Last week on my rooted samsung admire that I had changed the tethethering command in the build prop, I still couldn't access any web page on either IE or Firefox on windows 7. It took me right to metro's page but it didn't load, just a link with metro's terms & conditions about wifi tethering. No matter where I tried to go I got that message. One of my roommates has the lg esteem & has no problems. Then my phone was stolen, I got another one & tonight tried several of the tethering apps for non rooted phones & had the same problems I did before. So the issue here obviously isn't the area we live in. I guess it could be tower since he gets 4G . I don't have problems connecting to the net, just once I'm on I get the metro warning
 
easy fix by just adding a user agent switch to firefox. firefox isn't my favorite browser, but it's getting some much needed work i needed to do done.
 
Metro PCS has only blocked the 3g users from wifi tethering. All 4g users will have and continue to have wifi tethering for a while. Metro hasn't gt a total grasp on the network at all so far. Until then it will mostly go unregulated
 
Atlboy21089 said:
Metro PCS has only blocked the 3g users from wifi tethering. All 4g users will have and continue to have wifi tethering for a while. Metro hasn't gt a total grasp on the network at all so far. Until then it will mostly go unregulated
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You could even test what I'm saying 3g users by trying it, and every web page will bring up the metro PCS agreement about tethering.4g users, Even if you start your tethering on 4g and your browsing the net, if for some reason your signal drops down to 3g coverage, the agreement pages will start popping up on every page. The second your signal kicks back to 4g, your able to browse again instantly. That's exactly how it works. I use to tether all the time on my last 3g phone I had some months ago. One day the messages started popping up when I was browsing, it never stopped to this day. Got a 4g indulge, I can tether again... This is from experience not just browsing forums. So please feel free to test it. :-)
 
Atlboy21089 said:
Metro PCS has only blocked the 3g users from wifi tethering. All 4g users will have and continue to have wifi tethering for a while. Metro hasn't gt a total grasp on the network at all so far. Until then it will mostly go unregulated
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Your wrong tethering on 4g isnt possible on pc or laptop without changing user agent on your browsers. as far tethering on any other mobile devices you should be fine.
 
n4zty said:
Your wrong tethering on 4g isnt possible on pc or laptop without changing user agent on your browsers. as far tethering on any other mobile devices you should be fine.
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I agree. I'm using a user agent switcher on my chrome browser. Its the only way to get proper access via wifi from my phone. I'm typing this on it right now actually. Its annoying with some sites but it delivers. Thankfully, I'm grandfathered in and get to keep my plan and rate. I figure its not like I'm using the phone in addition to my laptop and I do everything on my laptop pretty much how I do it on my phone internet wise. No shame here heh.
 
tiede said:
I'm browsing and posting this on my lappy right now, and http traffic works just fine...
But I just thought about this earlier today: I don't use windows. I am actually using Ubuntu Linux, so maybe the metroPCS block is not whitelisting the R910, but rather blacklisting windows as OS. So if you don't want to be plagued with Mobile versions of websites while trafficking because your user agent appears to come from a phone, try to change the OS to say Linux instead of MS Winblows...

For example, here is my user agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0
and it's working just fine.


Done rambling on... Hope this helped...
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Same here but with Ubuntu derived PinguyOS 12.04 using Chrome.

TRS-80 said:
That could very well be, tiede.

Can anyone else confirm or deny their experiences with this? We are trying to get this one nailed down. Please post whether or not you can browse the web (via wifi tether) and what operating system + browser you are using, so we can test this theory further...
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PinguyOS with Chrome.
 
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