So I’ve been out of work for a few months and due to this things like cable and cell phone are cut off. While I was mooching some found opened wifi I decided to connect the VPN service I use on my MacBook to my iPhone -I ain’t hopping on random wifi without some protection! Anyway, while I was in the car I got a notification of a new email. Odd, since the service was cut off. I decided to do some investigating and found that I’m able to surf the web, connect to whatever app service and do whatever. Called to check and see if some money fairies paid my cell bill and no it was still off. Got home and through the VPN I’m able to connect to my home wifi -again also cut off due to no money.
It seems like they’ve done a moderately half-assed job of cutting off your internet. Who is your ISP?
If I was forced to guess (and this is totally a guess) they will have intentionally left open your wifi to let you access their billing website so you can re-instate your service. It would be easy enough for you to check if that’s not the case.
If that is the case then presumably they’ve done something like set up a captive portal on the web socket but not firewalled everything else.
I would tread carefully. They will still be logging the bandwitdh used and may bill you for it later.
Using a VPN is a known “method” to get free internet access via 3G/4G networks , it depends on the firewall of the ISP , also you can do this in some adsl networks , also mac spoofing is known to work in cable modems and so on , the why is simply becouse your isp does NOT cut off the access to their captive portal and if your vpn is not flagged as a openvpn traffic it will connect to the vpn giving you full access to internet , port 80 and 443 (SSL) can do the trick in 4g 3g and some homelines , but if they send someone to cut the wire thats comming from outside you cant do anything , but your phone can still work with vpn .