@md5150 hello, when you are connected, then your ip is the one from your home and it equals like if you were in your network, you should be able to reach all your local networks devices too. You can use it for banking and other services with specific restrictions (like geo location), where if you use commercial vpn's servers which mostly are shared servers, then your banking service might not work (its different from bank to bank).

 

Does this act like a 3rd party VPN when my IP is hidden and such?

Not sure what the question is, if you mean by that if your mobile phone's connection's ip is hidden, then kinda yes, as you do use your home as gateway and only your home networks IP is visible.

 

L2TP is outdated and not really secure, if you use commercial vpn's then you have all different protocols which you can use. I would suggest to use Wireguard as it would give you best performance, if you are in China and you might need additional obfuscation of your network to pass the wall.

 

When you talk about commercial VPN's, then you need to have a device in your network which is connected to that vpn, you then connect to same device, here is example for wireguard, the one which acts as server has something like this as it's peer:

 

[Interface]
Address = 10.123.123.123/24 # this is internal ip address of your interface for commercial vpn (acts as client)

Address = 178.16.123.1/24     # this sets address of your vpn's subnet, clients get/set ip's in that range are allows (acts as server)

... other interface settings like private key etc

 

# peer,  your commercial vpn
[Peer]
PublicKey = YOURPUBLICKEY
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0                 # this means, all traffic will be routed over your vpn provider
Endpoint = 123.123.123.123:12345
PersistentKeepalive = 25

 

# your mobile phone - 178.16.123.43/32 is the address your phone will have set in its own config as Address

# 178.16.124.0/24 is not really required on your phone, as your phone will probably never act as vpn server where devices will connect to it and use it's network.
[Peer]
PublicKey = YOURMOBILEPHONESPUBKEY
AllowedIPs = 178.16.123.43/32,178.16.124.0/24 
PersistentKeepalive = 10

 

 

That would be it. When you then create a config for your phone, then you will have something like this:

[Interface]
Address = 178.16.123.43/32 # this is internal ip address of your interface for mobile phone (acts as client)

#Address = 178.16.124.0/24    # optional, probably never required for phone, this sets address of your vpn's subnet, clients get/set ip's in that range are allows (acts as server)

... other interface settings like private key etc

 

[Peer]
PublicKey = YOURVPNSERVERSPUBKEY
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0  # 0.0.0.0 means again, use it as gateway, where your mobile would use like you want IP address of your commercial vpn provider

#AllowedIPs = 178.16.123.43/32,178.16.123.1/24 # if you do want to use your phones mobile connection but have encrypted access to your home devices, then comment out 0.0.0.0 and use instead ip addresses of devices which you want to reach.

 

 

The example above let's you easily edit the config or save multiple, wireguard's application on phone is quite simple and straightforward, working well and not eating the battery. I am not sure which VPN providers allow usage of original wireguard client, one of those which do support it is TorGuard where you also can have private IP's which would work with your banking too.