Hello. I am a traveler in MY and I also found out this ridiculous hotspot quota. On Digi I got restrictions and Celcom charge extra for hotspot, and this is very frustrating. I never have this problem in any other countries, only Malaysia. So I decided to defeat this monster.

I found a way to bypass hotspot detection.

The telco can only detect if hotspot or tethering is being used by detecting multiple MAC address on the same mobile connection. So to bypass hotspot and tethering detection, you can make all data appear from the mobile, so other devices are invisible to the telco.

To do this you can setup a proxy application on the mobile, and then configure iPad or laptop or other devices to use mobile as a proxy server. If using WiFi hotspot or Bluetooth tether this is very easy as they are on a same network.

There are some apps designed for this. The one I have used is Netshare. No root needed and works over Bluetooth and wifi. Also you can share WiFi to WiFi (repeater mode) so you can cover whole house with 4G wifi 😘

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?...a.prog.mikrotik

https://m.apkpure.com/netshare-no-root-teth...a.prog.mikrotik

It is very easy to set a system setting to use proxy on iPad iPhone Android etc. It works great!

I hope this helps some people. I put a lot of research into this and solved the problem for my home, no more buying hotspot quota or "hotspot pass" add-on. Just use normal data quota and stay hidden.
Cheers

I never had much luck with PdaNet+ but was able to easily bypass hotspot restrictions with NetShare app.

I have also had success with ShellTun, Shadowsocks and a manual ssh tunnel with socks listener.

I know that DPI and huge download volume would likely identify someone abusing this, but most people won't trigger any alerts if they are just trying to tether a laptop so they can get work done without dealing with insane "hotspot pass" quotas.

Did I mention I have never seen this anywhere else in the world? Only in Malaysia. It doesn't make much sense to me. Why not just sell people an amount of download quota and let them decide how to use it? That's how it works everywhere else. If I buy 30gb prepaid mobile data and decide to share it between 3 devices, and burn through it more quickly, that's my choice. Why should a second device be charged extra? It seems dishonest to me.

Anyway, bypassing hotspot detection is also a little dishonest, but these ISPs bring it upon themselves. As long as you don't heavily abuse it to get terabytes of anime torrents or "Linux ISOs", you should be fine 😁