How do mobile companies discover that you are using a 3G / 4G internet connection?

I just talked with a telephone company in Denmark that offers “free 3G / 4G” on the phone, but they have a limit, if you create an access point and exchange a connection, this limit is 50 GB.

How do they detect if your mobile device is connected? Do they intercept some special headers that the computer / other phones send over the connection?

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MAC addresses are used at a lower level than IP, and refer to each transition or leg from end to end, so they really do not help in this problem.

Detecting attached devices is a rather difficult task, and there are special solutions for this. They tend to consider a few things to try to determine if other devices are using a mobile connection, even if the devices are spoofing or manipulating headers, etc.

Examples of solutions to be considered in the solution:

  • number of simultaneous sessions
  • Custom HTTP Agent Headers
  • device type
  • device screen size
  • TCP timestamp
  • TCP source port
  • TCP Code Sequence
  • Application Based Correlation for TCP Streams
  • Node-paired correlation with TCP streams

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1652828/


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