so how do carriers tell the difference between regular usage and tethering usage? there’s one field on an IP packet called TTL time to live and that starts off at some number every time it goes through a router the router lowers it by one and the reason it does this is to avoid loops you can accidentally get routers set up wrong where the packets looking for some website start going in a circle bouncing from one router to the other one who sends it back to the first so long and so forth until just the whole internet grinds to a halt well they fix that by putting this TTL so that’s what’s happening the hotspot phone knocks down the TTL then sends it on to Verizon and they then spot this TTL’s lower than usual it’s not a fresh packet it’s not a fresh packet exactly and so they say oh we’ll count that as tethering so I’ve seen the word deprioritize deprioritization deprioritization used a lot is that different from throttling? deprioritization is a little more general it implies that the carrier is now taking your traffic less seriously than the other people and that could mean it throttles it it could just mean that it throttles it when their servers get busy it could mean it’s letting other users packets go first when both of you wanna send packets although that works out to basically throttling so the implication though I think by depriorization is that if the carrier is not busy they’ll still let you have full speed as other people get on they’re gonna slow you down a lot and but that’s not like a violation of net neutrality? no so the concept of net neutrality is that the internet service provider has to treat all those services and websites on the internet equally that’s neutral whether it’s right or wrong it’s not a violation of network neutrality it’s a violation of net neutrality to say I’m gonna slow down Netflix but I’m gonna let Peacock go full speed and that’s why Netflix created fast.com it is a speed test to how fast you can connect to Netflix it runs on the same exact computers they’re running the Netflix websites that are serving the videos so if they do anything to slow down your connection to Netflix it’ll slow down the results you’ll get out fast.com