iPhone How do providers know if you use tetherme or mywi?

[Iphone4sinwhite]

How do providers know if you use tetherme or mywi? Do they only know if you have tethering available in the settings menu such as on Verizon or AT&T?

 

[asdf12312]

They go by the APN.

Most people install tetherme and leave the defaults APN settings.
The default settings for ATT are "phone" for internet and "broadband" for tethering.

If you enable tethering, it will connect to the broadband one and ATT will know you are tethering. In the tetherme settings, you can change the APN for the tethering from broadband to the same one as regular internet, phone. Then, you should be OK.

My 0.02

 

[From A Buick 8]

There are several post asking that same question with lots of very in depth technical responses.

Has something to do with packets, im sure others will layout the details. Bottom line they will know if they look hard enough.

 

[r.j.s]

There may be other ways as well.

One speculated way is the TTL (Time To Live). Tethering has a different TTL than data originating on the phone. This hasn't been confirmed, as the carriers aren't going to let people know how they know.

 

[aPple nErd]

Should I change apn for tetherme? iPhone 5 2gb plan LTE...

 

[la79]

Been trying to get some answers to this and other questions in another thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1539906/

 

[Applejuiced]

We dont know for sure.
Sometimes they just hit customers with high data usage even though they didnt tether before. So they're not that consistent either.