I travel w/my trucker husband & of course I do just about everything on my phone from banking to stream cartoons. But my laptop is a paperweight out here on the road. How does my phone supply an internet browser if my laptop can’t?
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A lot of people are talking about the SIM card but aren’t really giving it any explanation. It’s basically an ID card that gets tied to you so your phone company knows who you are when your phone connects to the towers. It allows them to look you up and see how much data you’ve purchased and used and decides whether to let you use more or not or throttle/charge for the data.
Your laptop may or may not have an antenna that is capable of sending/receiving the same frequency as the phone/cell towers, but even if it did, your carrier doesn’t recognize the device because it has no SIM card and so it will not send any data to/from the Internet for it.
Actually, your ISP also has to know every device that connects to their hubs and whether it’s owned by someone that purchased Internet through them and what speeds/caps. The thing is, your laptop doesn’t connect directly to the hub. It connects to your router/modem which connects to their hub. And unless they’re being shady and giving you altered equipment, they can’t tell what device is accessing the Internet through your router. And your phone can do the same thing with WiFi hotspot. It turns your phone into the router, and your cell carrier has no idea that the data is coming from the laptop originally, but they probably have a way to know that hot spotting is turned on and throttle data speeds.
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