If I am running a hot spot off of my cell phone while running a VPN on it, does this protect any other device that may use the hot spot from the phone that has the VPN protection ?

No

So each device ?

Makes sense. Your phone is connected to the cell tower. You access the internet on the phone using a VPN. But the phone's radio just carries the signal. So when another device hops on that signal, it is a second user of the bandwidth. It doesn't know that there is a VPN going unless you programed the phone to route other signals through your VPN (if that is even possible).

quote:

Originally posted by golddot:
So each device ?

Yes

It depends on the software running on the phone, not so much the VPN software, but the routing, firewall, etc. If your phone is NAT'ing the WiFi devices "behind" it to the outside world, then this traffic probably is going through the VPN tunnel, if not, it depends, among other things, on how your provider has provisioned their services.

One way you can check if you are being NAT'ed is to go to a speedtest site and look at your apparent IP address (some VPN implementations also provide this information). Do this on both your phone and your WiFI-connected device. If NAT'ing is going on, the address shown as belonging to your phone and the one on a connected WiFi device will (usually) be the same, or at least within the same netblock (numerically close).

This presumes that there is no router, etc. "upstream" from your phone that is performing NAT (Network Address Translation). Recording a range of IP address values (e.g. with VPN active/without/hotpsot disabled/etc.) can help to etablish how the routing is being performed. Traceroute is another useful tool for doing this.

Thanks fellas

Just to clarify...only one phone has service, the one with the a time hotspot..the other one is an old cell that has no service on it and only works on wifi