USB tethering on your smartphone
Anyone who has a smartphone with either WiFi access or a data contact, and has a USB cable that can link their phone to their computer, can create USB ethernet that way. Just plug the phone in and select "USB tethering" on the phone menu. I sometimes used it for a speed boost on Windows on a laptop whose ancient WiFi chip gave me far slower speeds than my phone. But for FreeBSD it's even more useful.
The FreeBSD Handbook claims you need to manually load the appropriate driver into the kernel before you can tether, which suggests you need to be at the command line. This seems to be years out of date however - since FreeBSD 12, devmatch has dynamically loaded drivers when hardware is recognised. So even while in the install stage, I've been able to plug my phone in, select USB tethering, and the USB ethernet just appears as ue0 in the network configuration menu! Worth a try if you're having WiFi woes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1dprdrx/is_freebsd_handbook_section_on_usb_tethering/
Biting the hand that feeds IT
