patrick.net

I know someone who is doing it. It's a single person living my themselves and they got tired of paying way too much for internet and got it added to their Verizon plan for only another $20/month.

Having written that, you might want to wait for 5G networks. Once that's available this type of thing will become common.

Those hotspots are capped at 1 gig.
And no I've never gotten acceptable speeds for stuff like Remote Desktop and Streaming live content.

With T mobile you can add Hotspot for $25 or $20 for certain plans. It's fast enough to be used as home internet but the phone does not reach the whole flat/house typically and you have to carry it from room to room unless you add your own routers. I don't think it's capped but they may slow you after 50 gigs though they may have removed that restriction by now not sure.

zzyzzx says

Having written that, you might want to wait for 5G networks. Once that's available this type of thing will become common.

Aren't they already sprouting up in the bigger cities? I swear instead of seeing LTE on my phone I've seen something like 5Ge by where the signal meter is in the burbs of Chicago.

I could easily hotspot my phone and it would provide more than enough speed both ways to get just me by. Streaming and kids is the bitch though. And while I don't need speed so to speak, I do need volume for some uploads I do overnight for video and images.

More mergers same shitty service and price is the most likely outcome.

Another potential problem (in addition to the cap) is that your devices and computers are probably sucking up more bandwidth than you know. I run macOS at home and have noticed all sorts of daemons using an unexpectedly high amount of data.

SunnyvaleCA says

Another potential problem (in addition to the cap) is that your devices and computers are probably sucking up more bandwidth than you know. I run macOS at home and have noticed all sorts of daemons using an unexpectedly high amount of data.

No firewall to block app data usage?

OccasionalCortex says

Yup. It will be the death knell of cable/telephone/satellite provided cable as we know it.

Besides Comcast, whom else should I short?

Booger says

SunnyvaleCA says

Another potential problem (in addition to the cap) is that your devices and computers are probably sucking up more bandwidth than you know. I run macOS at home and have noticed all sorts of daemons using an unexpectedly high amount of data.

No firewall to block app data usage?

Allow me to recommend Little Snitch for blocking all kinds of traffic from your Mac:

https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

I use my phone as a hotspot very often, providing internet to my laptop, or in cases where my home internet is out, to my desktop. In the past, to get away with hotspot without having to pay an extra monthly fee, I used the pdanet app for maybe 5 years with total success. But, now I have a phone that uses the stock android rom w/o any carrier specific crap, so I can just use native android hotspot/tether functionality and it creates a reliable wifi hotspot.

I tend to get good bandwidth (usually around 10mbps if I have good signal and a real "LTE Advanced" tower, but it's not uncommon to get 50), but 70-150ms latency is often the reality.

I usually use MVNOs, who resell the name brand towers for cheaper (ie, walmarts straight talk, net10, boost, virgin mobile, etc...). But, you tend to be a 2nd class citizen, sometimes having less speed, and often worse latency than if you bought the same service direct from the real company (ie, att). I recently tried a friend's verizon hotspot, which worked so well (both speed and latency) that I'm considering ponying up the $100/mo for it.