To try and make the post short. I got my steam deck to connect to my Verison hotspot. Worked great till I ran out of hotspot data. Now my hotspot still works but only up to 500Kbps (mostly 300 or less). Is there a way to get the spread deck to mask its hotspot data usage and take directly from 5G, 5GUW without using data. I read that if you use a VPN it may work but I can’t get VPNs (PairVPN) to work as a client on the steam deck.
Any help will be much appreciated.
um…. that’s not possible. being on a hotspot is using data, not using data would mean not having a connection
It seems you are asking how to use you phone’s data not tethering data when tethering. Please be fully aware that it breaks the contract between you and your carrier which obviously breaks the law. The following content is for educational purpose only and you should never follow any of these instructions.
Basically you need to make the carrier to believe that the data traffic is for some apps on your phone, not for some other devices that are brought online by your phone.
If you have a rooted android phone it is easy. After you setup the hotspot on your phone, you need to modify all the TTL value of your packets forwarded by your phone. Your carrier typically uses TTL to distinguish traffic from your phone and traffic from other devices.
Another way is for non-rooted android devices. This is not quite straight forward so let me explain some basic ideas.
You need the termux app and a raspberry pi or some other low cost single board computers of your choice. It must have at least 1 usb port or 1 wifi module (the following steps assume it has 1 usb port AND 1 wifi module, OR is just the minimum requirement)
Install a vpn server of your choice in termux, and listen on some non privileged ports.
Connect your phone to your raspberry pi using a usb cable, turn on usb tethering.
On the raspberry pi, you can see now you have “usb0” network. Find your phone’s ip address and install vpn client that matches your vpn server. Start the client and make sure it connects to the server on your phone.
Setup wifi hotspot on your raspberry pi (usually this means hostapd + dnsmasq), and setup iptable rules to forward all the traffic from your pi’s wifi hotspot to your vpn tunnel (NOT “usb0”)
Now you can use your hotspot without consuming your tethering data, only your phone’s data.
I think a raspberry pi zero w can do this pretty well and it can also run on your phone battery, making this setup fully portable.
I know very little about iphones since I don’t own one. But I can also think of some similar solutions.
If you jailbroke you iphone, there must be some way that is similar to the rooted android solution, since you have complete control over your phone and can do a lot of low level modifications.
If your iphone is not jailbroken, then it is the same with the non-rooted android case. All you need is:
A vpn server on your iphone (do they exist in appstore? maybe sideload one using sideloadly)
Some way to establish a network connection between your iphone and raspberry pi.
For 2:
you may consider lightning to ethernet adapter, and use an ethernet cable to connect your phone to your pi
you can also test if “ethernet over usb” works (need a device that supports usb gadget mode, such as pi zero. It is not “usb tethering” on your phone)
you can also broadcast two wifi signals on your pi, one connects your iphone to your pi and the other is your hotspot. Obviously you need an additional usb wifi dongle along with the built-in wifi module. (one wifi signal instead of two can also work, it will just make the iptable rules a little more complicated)
As long as the vpn client on the pi can connect to the server on the phone, the rest is basically the same.
No, because it’s not about the type of traffic but the traffic itself. A VPN just masks what you’re doing, but there’s still data going through Verizon’s network, and they know you’re on a hotspot. A VPN can work for situations where only specific kinds of things are throttled, like some cell networks will throttle streaming video, for example, so if you can hide the fact that you’re streaming video, you can potentially work around that. However, if it’s just all traffic, as the situation is here, there’s nothing a VPN can do.
Thank you all for the informative information. I’m not trying to do anything illegal. Was just seeing if I can bypass the throttling of speeds past the hotspot data cap. Guess I’ll just download at home before trips or just download off of free WiFi.
My work wifi blocks all things gaming and streaming. Ive tried many different vpns to get around this and xvpn is the only one ive found that works for all games and video streaming. Now if only I could figure out how to get this on my deck! As it currently stands as soon as i max my piddly monthly allowance on hot spot I no longer have the ability to play online games. 
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I don’t think this is possible, and if it was possible it would likely be illegal, but best of luck. Using a VPN on the steam deck should not work, because you’d be connected to a VPN that’s then connected to your phone and the issue isn’t your steam deck’s data, it’s your phone’s data. If you’re researching this, I would just focus on trying to get the phone itself to ignore / not report the data cap, which I bet is possible but is definitely illegal. You would connect to the internet via a vpn on your phone, and then set up a wifi tether to the steam deck as normal.
That said, you can play a lot of games with even the throttled data speed. For SW:The Old Republic, I’m finding data usage of approx 17mb per hour, which would be less than 5kb/s, well under the throttled speed, as long as you’ve already downloaded the game.
No I want to use my cellular hotspot but have the same speeds as cellular data not hotspot data. No need to be rude or get blocked. It’s a question as in why this post was made. I was just asking if it was possible. If not that’s all that needs said.