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How to access the Internet from my Mac through my iPhone's cellular connection without using the plan's hotspot data?

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2 answers
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I have an occasional need, when traveling, to access the Internet from my Mac using my iPhone's cellular data plan. But I wish to do so without making use of my cellular plan's hotspot data. While my phone's data plan lets me access "unlimited" data from my phone, my plan only allows 2GB per month of hotspot data. In other words, when I connect my Mac to the "Personal Hotspot" provided by my iPhone, I'm severely limited in the amount of data my Mac can access. I don't need an excessive amount of data but I do need a lot more than 2GB in a month. So I'm looking for ways around using the iPhone's "Personal Hotspot" feature which depends on my plan's hotspot data limit. No external Wi-Fi will be available during this time. Is there any way to allow my Mac to use my iPhone's cellular data without using my plan's hotspot data? I've done a lot of searching and the few results I've found about avoiding a person hotspot is to enable USB tethering. But this is done on the Personal Hotspot settings screen. And when my Mac is setup to use this network connection, my cellular provider is showing that hotspot data is being used (and the iPhone has the green capsule in the top-left corner of the screen). Checking email, general web browsing, and some file downloads can be done on my iPhone directly. But some things must be done on the Mac. Some examples of things I might need to do on my Mac while making use of the iPhone's cellular Internet access: - Update macOS on my Mac - Run an app on my Mac that needs Internet access to obtain data Is there a 3rd party app that can be run on the iPhone that can act as some sort of proxy that the Mac can be setup to use? Or is there some other way? I'm currently running iOS 18.3.2 and macOS 15.3.2.
Asked by HangarRash (169 rep)
Mar 15, 2025, 04:30 PM
Last activity: Mar 25, 2025, 05:38 AM