“T‑Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T‑Mobile ONE plan.” That was the promise. The Un-contract. The whole reason millions of customers picked the magenta team over Verizon and AT&T in the first place. Now T-Mobile is retiring legacy 3G and 4G-era plans — Magenta, ONE, Simple Choice — and automatically moving customers onto “modern” 5G plans at higher monthly costs. Billing changes hit mid-July for the current wave. The company that swore it would never surprise you with a rate hike just sent the notification.
Two things:
Sadly, my USB port completely borked, so that’s off the table. I use KDE-something-or-other to txfr files over my internetless wifi.
Second, I did look into it, and even on my Graphene OS phone, the USB tether is treated identically to the hot spot; that is to say, the carrier can detect you’re connecting a device and there is no workaround other than paying the cellular provider for the privilege of using your connection as they see fit.