I’m sitting here in a small closed room, deep in a building with poor reception. I click a link to open up a picture from the internet, and then it takes several minutes for the picture to load. If I had been outside, with better reception, the picture loads in under a second. So I am assuming the cell tower is continuously sending the information to my phone. Does the network read the amount of data sent by the tower or does it only count what my phone decrypts? Follow up question: if it only counts what my phone picks up, then wouldn’t that be exploitable?
In: Technology
> Does the network read the amount of data sent by the tower
Yes. It counts the number of bytes being sent to your phone and the number of bytes being received from your phone by the network. The network doesn’t care about the content of those bytes. They can be encrypted or not, but the byte count still increases.
There are companies (like T-Mobile) that don’t count usage on certain apps. They still don’t look into the packet, they just know that “Hey, these packets are coming from IPs belonging to Netflix, so we don’t add them to the billing threshold”
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