In the scramble to get people to, work from home over the past weeks, we discovered three that do not have home internet. They asked us for broadband dogles or modems, to which we said use your phone, data charges are similar etc. They contacted their respective telcos who all said don't use your phone for this, especially for long periods as it may damage the phone. I couldn't find any compelling evidence for or against. On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 3:09 pm Russell Coker via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:

On Friday, 27 March 2020 11:14:41 AM AEDT stripes theotoky via luv-main wrote:

...

I have the following question: I need to get a mobile broadband hotspot. Currently the telstra website shows the 4GX hotspot at $149 and the 4GX Wi-Fi Pro at $119. However, when clicking on buy online for the 4GX

The cheapest new Android phone that Kogan offers is $159. Second hand phones are cheaper. Why do you want a dedicated Wifi device when you could get a phone that does it as well as other things?

-- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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On Saturday, 28 March 2020 8:29:33 PM AEDT Brian May via luv-main wrote:

Colin Fee via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> writes:

...

In the scramble to get people to, work from home over the past weeks, we discovered three that do not have home internet. They asked us for broadband dogles or modems, to which we said use your phone, data charges are similar etc.

They contacted their respective telcos who all said don't use your phone for this, especially for long periods as it may damage the phone.

That's ridiculous. I've done lots of long term wifi usage on lots of phones and never had any sorts of problems. I've had phones run as Wifi hotspots for multiple weeks on end without problems. The only potential problem is that Wifi uses more power and therefore causes the phone to dissipate more heat. If you have a phone on the dash of your car on a hot day then running a Wifi hotspot could be the thing to push it over the edge. Strangely Korea is about the same distance from the equator as Sydney but Samsung doesn't even do a good job of making phones that cope with Melbourne weather. Probably telcos don't want people actually using the bandwidth quotas that they pay for.

My experience of using my Phone, a Galaxy Note 10+ 5G, as a Wifi hotspot, is it is good most of the time, but terrible when it encounters congestion.

I've had that in the past but not recently and not when using a telco that runs on the Telstra network. What provider have you seen such problems with?

As in it never drops packets, ping times are measured in minutes, and even when you leave the congested area it still doesn't work correctly -

I've seen it delay DNS packets longer than the timeout which then causes longer delays as DNS repeats use up all bandwidth. At one stage I had my laptop configured to use IP addresses for everything that mattered to alleviate that problem. But that was with the Vodafone network and I think the Optus network, not Telstra. I don't know how much of the problem was due to old network hardware (GSM and 3G vs 3G and 4G), how much was due to old phones, and how much was due to non-Telstra networks. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

Hello Russell, On 3/28/20, Russell Coker via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:

On Friday, 27 March 2020 11:14:41 AM AEDT stripes theotoky via luv-main wrote:

...

I have the following question: I need to get a mobile broadband hotspot. Currently the telstra website shows the 4GX hotspot at $149 and the 4GX Wi-Fi Pro at $119. However, when clicking on buy online for the 4GX

The cheapest new Android phone that Kogan offers is $159. Second hand phones are cheaper. Why do you want a dedicated Wifi device when you could get a phone that does it as well as other things?

There have been cases of the phone being "ported" to a different mobile service provider, and the phone being stripped of personal data. It may be not common, but it is a real risk. There are also issues about the durability of the various devices. My mobile is a Nokia 6120-c, and is still locked to the Telstra network. It can do the Internet, but the screen is way too small, and while it will do bluetooth, I have a Telstra 4GX Advanced III, with the cradle, and that does both WiFi, and has ethernet ports. The local mobile tower is now nominally 4G, but the speeds are very variable. I am about 1,000 meters from the mobile phone tower where my copper pair ends, but there is not the equipment to support wired ADSL, which would be my preference after fiber to the home. I will say that the 4GX with cradle is an effective solution where you do not want to be tied to the phone, but the quota is small without paying more, and itis no longer possible to share the data between the phone and another mobile device. I have 5 Gig + 5 Gig now, and 40 Gig on the phone I cannot touch. The phone makes and takes calls, does SMS/MMS and takes photos. I will not do Internet browsing on a less than 50mm screen. When I do update the phone, I will want a Purism Librem phone, but I will need to be able to afford. I will also choose to lock the sim to the phone company, so that changing will require a visit in person, inconvenient, but a measure of security. Regards, Mark Trickett

On Saturday, 28 March 2020 8:37:23 PM AEDT Mark Trickett via luv-main wrote:

There have been cases of the phone being "ported" to a different mobile service provider, and the phone being stripped of personal data. It may be not common, but it is a real risk. There are also

There are many rumors about this. If you have a recent phone that has an SSL implementation without flaws (IE not Android 2.3 or something) then a hostile intermediary can't fake the Play Store and push apps on you. If you have Android 2.3 and aren't important in some way (why would someone who meets any definition of "important" be using Android 2.3?) then hostile parties probably won't try to attack you, they will go for the wealthier 99% of the market. An Android phone won't inherently have any information on you other than access to a Gmail account. Whether that is a risk depends on what you do with your Gmail account, admittedly Google tries to coerce users into using their Gmail account for many things.

issues about the durability of the various devices. My mobile is a Nokia 6120-c, and is still locked to the Telstra network. It can do the Internet, but the screen is way too small, and while it will do bluetooth, I have a Telstra 4GX Advanced III, with the cradle, and

My observation is that devices become unable to use the right frequencies before they become unusable due to other reasons. I've got a couple of Android 2.3 phones that still work OK for what they do, but they use the old Telstra frequencies and now that GSM has gone away they can't be used on any non-Telstra network and are pretty much unusable on Telstra. Phones haven't got much bigger since the first Galaxy Note was released in 2011. Phones haven't had much usable improvement in displays since the Galaxy Note 3 was released in 2013 with a FullHD display (there aren't many laptops with a higher resolution than that on sale now). The main factor stopping continued use of phones is lack of security support. If you want a long-term secure phone you need to install your own OS. Doing so is really hard because phones were not designed like PCs - which I consider to be a significant flaw. I think that as the first Android phone had 256M of RAM (256* more than a real- mode PC could address and 64* more than the first Linux PC I used) there's no reason that it couldn't have had a standard "BIOS" interface to provide basic video without special drivers (before OS specific drivers are loaded) and basic touch screen and storage access. Then it could have been designed for multiple boot devices so if you wanted to try a new OS on your phone you could just install a new micro-SD card that was bootable. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

On Sunday, 29 March 2020 11:33:39 AM AEDT Mark Trickett via luv-main wrote:

This is not the Android, or app store, but someone spoofing your identity to contact a phone connection provider, and have your number moved to someone else, like between Optus and Vodaphone, or Optus and Telstra. Having done so, they can get access to everything on the phone, and bank accounts have been stripped.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/sim-swap/ Brian Krebs has some good articles on this topic (all his articles are worth reading). That is only a security problem if you use a phone number for things related to security. Don't use SMS as your 2FA, use a hardware device or an Android app (Googles GAuth or Microsoft Authenticator for example). Also don't have your security based on someone calling you on your mobile phone.

This is why I want the sim and device locked to the one network, until I present in person with sufficient ID to then choose to migrate. I do

Is this something that Australian providers can do? A SIM used for a 3G Wifi hotspot device will have a phone number and can be used to receive calls and SMS if you know the number. There is no functional difference between a phone used as a Wifi hotspot and a 3G Wifi dedicated device. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/