iPhone hotspot does NOT provide VPN when iPhone connected to AirVPN?

[Hobbyist 0]

Hello,

 

   Just signed up today with AirVPN after reading a lot of reviews over the past week or so. I was surprised to find out that an iPhone hotspot does not provide a VPN connection to connected devices.

 

   My thought was that since my iPhone is now a router (since it is providing a hotspot to other wifi devices), that those connected devices would also go through the VPN, but this is not the case. When I visited the airvpn.org website, I did not see the "Connected" status at the bottom of the page, so I decided to see what IP address my iPad was given when connected to my iPhone's hotspot. I then did a DNS check on the IP address from my desktop computer, and it returned "***********.myvzw.com" (my cellular provider is Verizon).

 

   Is this expected? I was happy to see that AirVPN allows 3 connections with one account, so I though, "Perfect! I can use one (eventually - just need to set it up on my pfSense box) on my firewall at home for our LAN, one on my iPhone when I'm away from home, and my wife can have the third on her iPhone when she's away from home. Then, whenever we want to use our iPads or laptops when we're away from home through our iPhone hotspots, we'll still be connected to the VPN through our iPhone hotspot."

 

   I'm not criticizing AirVPN at all - the majority of reviews gave AirVPN a great review, and I do plan on staying with it - I just went with the one month plan to make sure that I'm not getting in too deep with the technical details regarding VPN stuff before I pay for a yearly subscription, while I get my pfSense box set up with AirVPN properly (and figure out the reverse also - how to run a VPN server on my pfSense box at home so that I can connect to my LAN securely when I'm not at home).

 

   Anybody with some comments or insights regarding the iPhone hotspot issue would be greatly appreciated, as it appears that a new connection to my cellular provider occurs to any connected devices through the hotspot, rather than simply routing them through the hotspot with the same connection. (I wonder if it's the device or the cellular provider that does this - anybody with an Android or different cellular provider care to test this and comment back here on this?)

 

   Thanks for any input,

 

      Hobbyist

 

[Staff 10016]

Hello!

 

Very interesting. It comes out that "the personal iOS hotspot feature, as for the USB/bluetooth tethering and MyWi, binds the traffic on a the 3G interface. OpenVPN changes the routing and uses the PPP interface, so the packets coming from the shared clients are bound to the 3G but the system route is going to the PPP interface, so it doesn't work." (by the author of GuizmoVPN app: http://www.guizmovpn.com/index.php?option=com_agora&task=topic&id=119&p=1&Itemid=15#p438 ).

 

Kind regards

[Hobbyist 0]

Thanks for the response regarding this - that's unfortunate that the hotspot device does not act as a router in this case. My wife and I are usually together most of the time when we go out, so I think going forward I'll use my three connections like this whenever we are away from home:

 

 - VPN connection on my iPhone, then enable hotspot;

 - VPN connection on one of my devices (iPad or laptop);

 - VPN connection on one of my wife's devices (iPad or laptop)

 

As far as connecting to my home LAN when we're away, I can connect as many devices as I want since I control it (I just need to get that part set up).

 

   Thanks again, and take care!

 

      Hobbyist