Hotspot Shield is probably the only working free VPN solution that enables users from all over the world to access websites that provide their contents only to visitors from the United States. The software can be used to hear Pandora radio or watch tv at websites like Hulu (who seem to have banned the IPs of Hotspot Shield). The free version of Hotspot Shield has the disadvantage that is has a 3 Gigabyte transfer limit per month and that a connection cannot be established once the transfer limit has been reached.
While three Gigabytes is a lot of bytes when surfing the Internet it’s not enough if you regularly watch movies or hear radio which have much higher bandwidth demands than normal websites. Hotspot Shield does not require user accounts which means that they must have different means to track user bandwidth. Two possibilities are the IP address of the user and / or the MAC address of his network adapter.
Raymond already conducted some research on his own and he discovered that the Mac address is being used by Hotspot Shield to keep track of the bandwidth usage. The only thing left to do would be to change the MAC address to another one which would basically mean that the counter would be reset to 0 again and that the user could use another 3 Gigabytes with Hotspot Shield.
The easiest way to do that is a software called Mac MakeUP. Just install the software, select your network card, click on the Generate Random button, select completely random mac and click on the Change button. Et voila the MAC address has been changed. Reconnect to Hotspot Shield and you should be able to connect normally and use the service as usual.
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9 Responses to “Fix Bandwidth Exceeded in Hotspot Shield”
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If you are behind a NAT router, which MAC does it get? The router MAC or my network card’s MAC?
hi~I’ve got a question here. By using hotspot shield, it’s easy to visit the US-only websites, but for quite a long time, I’m starving for the BBC iplayer and absolutely the Hotspot shield can’t help, are there any possibilities for me to view videos of the BBC iplayer outside UK? Or are there any UK-edition Hotspotshield?
Hoping you can help me, thank you.:)
Rather stupid not to use IP or store a copy of IP with mac address.
@vero No hotspot shield is probably one of it’s kind and will probably soon go out of business with this much traffic but you could always try tor
No, Hotspot Shield can still connect me to Hulu.com. I’d say there’s no ban. But thanks for the Mac MakeUP info. I’ll have to link to it.
http://www.patricksoon.blogspot.com
Just thought you might want to know.. once you start watching the movie , e.g. at NBC, you can disconnect Hotspot Shield, the movie will restart and you can watch it using your normal IP address… ;-)
No hacking required…
Just follow my advise above about disconnecting Hotspot shield rather than hacking it by changing mac address. This free up bandwidth for others and help keep Hotspot Shield alive … This is useful services…. let’s be friendly to those who offer “free” services…
Just follow my advise above about disconnecting Hotspot shield rather than hacking it by changing mac address. This free up bandwidth for others and help keep Hotspot Shield alive … This is useful services…. let’s be friendly to those who offer “free” services…
Jay – Disconnecting used to work for me, but now doesn’t. Whenever I disconnect Hotspot Shield once I have logged onto a video site, it crashes my browser. I’m using Firefox. Any suggestions?