After a few days of internet malfunctions, I was finally motivated to put the time in and learn how to root an android phone and bypass the carrier’s ability to disable wifi tethering functionality
I personally figure that if you are paying for the data, a carrier shouldn’t be able to tell you how you use it. It’s a really useful feature and I loathe telecoms artificially disabling it to get a quick buck.
Obviously they could the argument that telecoms need to prevent abuse of instances where users with unlimited data plans use it to provide internet to their whole home network instead of just their phone… but this is a silly argument in my view as the providers could just stop offering “unlimited” plans in the first place if it was a real problem. A power user already could use more data than the average home network on their phone alone anyway… at a cost that is typically far greater than your average 20/down 10/up home plan. At some point data is just data.
Besides, there are already plenty of phones that enable this functionality regardless of carrier support. So enough about the ethics.
Let’s get it working.
Without further ado
Note: my phone is a pixel 3 and the guides and searches I found were tailored to this phone, but this guide should be sufficient for any android phone.
It is also sufficient to learn how to “root” a phone (which is grants root admin access on linux-based android so that you can modify it as you please).
Here it is:
- Enable developer options on your phone (easy to google)
- Enable “OEM unlocking”… if it is greyed out, this is where things get tricky:
If you have “OEM unocking” greyed out, your bootloader may be locked by your carrier (bastards), and this is the only possible workaround I found… It unfortunately did not work on my phone.
If you got your phone from Verizon, you might be in this boat. Best solution: don’t use Verizon.
Note that you probably need to run the fastboot commands in step 10 no matter what
3. Time to root the phone! I found this video to be most helpful:
4) Finally now that your phone is rooted, it’s time to disable the tethering carrier check with:
That’s it!
Basically: if you didn’t get your phone from Verizon, it should only take about 30 minutes. Otherwise it’s a bit of a crapshoot. Good luck!
Sources:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/pixel-xl/how-to/how-to-unlock-bootloader-verizon-pixel-t3796030
https://forum.xda-developers.com/pixel-3-xl/how-to/disable-carrier-tether-check-verizon-t3858614