Have you ever got a feeling that you would never go back once you tried something that was way better than you expected? That was my feeling once I replaced my router to an Asus one and get a taste of my fiber's maximum speed of 150 Mbps, as opposed to 90 Mbps limited by TP-Link' ancient hardware. Or that time I replaced my DSL connection to fiber back in 2015. From 3 Mbps to 25 Mbps was a massive jump I couldn't believe I didn't agree to have it earlier. But I was always a skeptic towards new technologies.
In early 2023, I was tasked with taking care of my grandparents. So I got some clothes, my laptop, my phone, my TV box and moved to my grandparents' house. During this time, I was preparing my documents and submitting them to various universities for a chance to study Masters in the USA. And using SCTV's "excellent" Internet service was an exercise in frustration. Every time I tried to access any web that was from the US, it would either hang, or chug along. You would need a massive tolerance for slowness to stand the kind of speed that makes the Chrome (or Firefox if you're like me) tab spin round and round. I have to use my VPN server, which is on Viettel Data Center, as a proxy to at least mitigate it. Being used to fiber, this was unacceptable. I asked my family to change ISP and their answer was no, which is understandable. SCTV's cable + Internet combo monthly rate was 220.000 VND, my fiber alone was worth that much.
Around this time, I came across an interesting offer from a new cell company.
I'm no stranger to using cellular network for Internet. I knew of its existence back in the early days of Vietnamese Internet. It was 2G network when I was 7 with my dad's Samsung slide phone. Back when it was ridiculously expensive because there was no data plan, you were billed by kilobyte so it was more of a novelty then a necessity like today. I've come to use it frequently since the day I got my first my smartphone, which was back in 2014, with my country utilizing 3G network, superseding 2G. 4G came about in 2016 or so. The three major cell networks: Viettel, Mobifone, Vinaphone, rolled out the carpet to welcome the new standard. I chose Viettel at the time because as a college student, money is pretty tight. So 30.000 VND/2,5 GB is a reasonable data plan as I do not use social media much at the time and Youtube could be watched at home. In 2019, iTel, a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) using Vinaphone as backbone, launched with a plan: 77.000 VND for 3GB per day. I only found out in 2021 through a flyer at the post office, because MVNOs here aren't known for their massive ad campaigns. Wanting to give it a test drive, I bought a sim and gave it to my sister, who used Facebook more than I do. She said it was good and didn't feel restricted by other networks' limited data caps. For references, 3GB/day equals to 90GB/month, far exceeded anything that were offered at the time. The other networks soon followed up with their own monthly "data cap per day" mode like this. Then I stumbled upon a data plan of Vinaphone: 500GB for 150.000 VND. That sounded good enough to me, and I'm not one to pass up an offer that good. So I bought a Vinaphone sim, replaced my aging Viettel one with it, and tested the network. It was good, though signal is a bit weak compared to Viettel. The data plan also comes with 5 Mbps if exceeded. I've been using Vinaphone on my phone ever since.
Back to grandparents' Internet story. I used my phone as a hotspot and continue my work. It was faster, around 80-150 Mbps down due to my place near a cell tower and had a faster response to any website I visited, especially those US university websites that were hard to get to.
I used a VSmart Live 4 with Android 11, which has an interface that is closest to being pure Android compared to Samsung. First, you have to turn on 4G and turn off wifi. Next, go to Settings -> Cellular -> Hotspot & Tethering. And turn on Wifi hotspot or USB Tethering, depending on your need.
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