Three Tether block notification keeps appearing
slick1two
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And I am not tethering! Not even once since I have had my Nexus 4. I switched to the ultimate internet sim 200, which has all you can eat data but doesn't allow tethering, ok that's fine. I've just been using the data on the phone itself. Everything been going great for 2 months, but for the past 3 days I have been getting a tethering block notification come up which stops me using data, until I restart the phone.
Called three and they told me to change the APN, which I did as the tech guy instructed, rebooted and same problem. He said if it doesn't sort it out, then do a factory reset, which I have done. Was ok for a day, but today it's back.
I'm not doing anything radically different in my browsing, and using pretty much same amount of data I've used in previous months around about 2.5-3gb.
Guess I will have to call back, anyone else had this happen?
Called three and they told me to change the APN, which I did as the tech guy instructed, rebooted and same problem. He said if it doesn't sort it out, then do a factory reset, which I have done. Was ok for a day, but today it's back.
I'm not doing anything radically different in my browsing, and using pretty much same amount of data I've used in previous months around about 2.5-3gb.
Guess I will have to call back, anyone else had this happen?
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Eventually sorted itself out been ok for a while now.
Hmmm, what on Earth is triggering it though? If there isn't any tethering going on?? Strange! I don't often have a bad word to say about three, but this is pretty annoying. Could an app be doing something weird that's making three think I am tethering? or the fact that I am using more than a gig of data? but then, I am getting all you can eat data with the plan so don't really get it.
I will have to call up three again.
Yup, it's nearly always an app or widget using a non mobile user agent to phone home. It's faulty software, rather than Theee's fault usually and they are forced into blocking people who haven't paid for a tethering plan because we've seen so many people abuse.
Yup, it's nearly always an app or widget using a non mobile user agent to phone home. It's faulty software, rather than Theee's fault usually and they are forced into blocking people who haven't paid for a tethering plan because when they didn't so many abused it.
'breaking their contract by denying a paid for service' Hopefully that's just very poor wording and you do understand the difference between a technical fault and a breach of contract.
It is faulty software that is non RFC compliant installed by the user that causing the fault probably
If developers aren't adhering to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt and are instead writing desktop user agent strings into mobile applications then it's faulty software.
I'd start by uninstalling any lesser known apps and seeing if the problem goes away. The last time a user had this problem they had some awful widget software on, I can't remember the name it, let's call it sh*te widget. That's the problem when you get apps written by less skilled coders.
That's why Three are saying do a factory restore which would fix it, until you put the dodgy app back on.
I disagree, and we're only in this situation because people cheated. 3 and others have been forced to try and block users that don't follow what they agreed to in the terms.
You can't blame 3 because the user has downloaded and installed a faulty application that is poorly written. This only effects a tiny minority of users, in all my time on forums like these I've only seen a handful of cases, every one is a really dodgy or crap app as well like that awful widget software that was posted before.
what they can control is their own blocking software which in this instance is not working fir a customer and they should deploy tethering software to allow for such a scenario.
When I called them the guy said even a change of browser could set it off.
But that's just the HTTP RFC which doesn't really cover mobile devices in any detail (it was written in 1999). Section 14.43 (user agents) doesn't state that an application's user agent must be truthful.
However, how do you know that Three's system isn't broken? Is it proven that a specific mobile app is sending an incorrect user agent and that app is on the OP's phone?
I am inclined to blame Three here - it must be a flaky system if you have to be careful about what apps and browsers you use on your phone for fear of having your connection shut off. It also doesn't help people who for some reason have to be spoofing a desktop user agent (to access different versions of web sites, or perhaps for dodgier web sites that only allow certain browsers despite being fully compatible).
It seems like the easiest and cheapest approach to solve the problem of blocking tethering, except that it doesn't do it particularly well. It really shouldn't be preventing people from doing otherwise perfectly legitimate things in order to catch the few people who might actually be causing a problem to the network with excessive tethering.
Anyone who actually knows what they're doing would just set up a VPN or SSH tunnel or something anyway.
http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/cc3333cc/SC20120528-211222.png
Yep that's the one.
With regards to apps which may be causing this I do have a clock widget called advanced clock widget. But Also tried this new weather app called 1weather. Could be one of those perhaps. I will remove them and see if that solves it. I have tried different browsers too. Recently been using boat. But I did set the user agent to desktop. Could that trigger the block? I actually prefer full sites than mobile ones. But it's still on my phone isn't really fair if I am penalized for using a desktop user agent when it's still on my ohone and not on a pc.
I got it regularly on different phones but after a while its just stopped.
Opera proxies you, fetching the content as desktop, returning it downscaled.
In any case you can still view the desktop version using a mobile UA, you just can't say you're internet explorer when you're a mobile browser.
This is a rare issue, nearly always caused by a dodgy app, and the only other option for Three would be to cancel the non tethering plans and take away that option, so that would mean saying goodbye to the £15 PAYG unlimited, as it's not commercially viable to offer tethering on that as well.
Giffgaff and others who do 'proper' unlimited, but no tethering also have these issues and have implemented measures to try and stop the cheats.
Your browser or an app that the user installed is reporting it's a desktop, not a mobile phone, so the anti-tethering is working correctly. It's the app that is faulty / root cause in my opinion, but others may disagree.
the issue here is all three
Or you could *shock* *horror* pay the extra for tethering if you want to cheat. Which would be cheaper / the same as using a VPN service or messing about SSH tunnelling through another server which has to stay on.
Good luck getting decent speeds and performance too with VPNs and tunnels.
Very few would even know how to do this, it's to stop the small minority who get a cheap PAYG deal and then try using it as their main internet, hammering it, when they only have handset data included.
The app is in the wrong / causing the issue in my opinion. As I say, the only other choice from the mobile network is to stop the non tethering plans all together and take those off the market, so consumers cannot buy them anymore.
This is so rare, I've only seen 3 posts about it in all my time on this and other forums. It's always "shy*e weather" or "rubbish widgets", some really crappy badly coded piece of software the user has installed causing it!
Restore to factory defaults and the issue will go away.
Install good software that it well known and you won't experience the issue. Skype, Google, BBC etc, if you've installed something from an "unheard of" company, then always try uninstalling that first and it'll fix it.
Anything that causes users (other than those tethering) to change their behaviour is broken imo.