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Palm Pre Does Not Get US Tethering Either
fermion writes "The Register is reporting that Palm has sent a note to the Pre Dev Wiki asking it to stop discussing tethering. Palm is worried that its US carrier partner, Sprint, is none too eager to have users tether the game-changing tetherable smart phone. While the communication was informal, not legal, the development forum is evidently eager to avoid any possibility of lawsuits, so has rapidly agreed. Perhaps, like the iPhone, the Pre is going have a vigorous underground. What is interesting is that the Pre, like the iPhone (allegedly), can be tethered outside of the US; but even those customers are being denied apparently lawful information to satisfy the US exclusive agents."
Was anyone really expecting the greedy phone companies to give us tethering?
You have a better chance of TPB and Time Warner merging into one company.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
For those that don't know, tethering is when you tie your phone to your computer and hit it around the computer several times, until the phone brakes your computer screen.
Tethering is legal in all states, but some phone companies seem to object to it, so they contractually prevent you from doing this.
Now that I have an unlimited data plan, if I could just figure out a way to use my telephone as a modem for my computer, because hey, it's my property and fair use laws means I have the legal right to view it on any sized screen I want.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Sprint allows the these phones to tether:
Blackberry 8703e, Blackberry 8130, Blackberry 8330, Blackberry 8830, 1HTC Touch, 1HTC Mogul (6800), 1HTC Apache (6700), LG Fusic LX-500, LG Muziq, Motorola KRZR, Motorola RAZR V3c, Motorola, RAZR2, Motorola Q, Motorola Q9c, Palm Centro, Palm 700w, Palm 755p, Samsung A900, Samsung A900M. Samsung A920, Samsung ACE, Samsung i830, Samsung SPH-m520,Sanyo SCP-8400. Sanyo Katana, Sanyo Katana 2, Sanyo M
The Pre is nothing special, and Sprint has no idea what it is doning.
Sprint removed it from their website back in February.
Did you really think that an industry that charges 15 cents for 50 bytes of text (IM) that could easily be stuffed into the header overhead of routine handset-to-tower comms would give you tethering for free? really?
Maybe I missed most of the argument here, but my Blackberry storm, from Verizon, can tether if I pay $15 per month. I did that for a while until I could convince my phone company to provide DSL to my area. Why are other phone companies against tethering, or am I completely misunderstanding something?
This space for rent, inquire within.
you know who else was adamantly against tethering?
NASA?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"This phone is a game-changer. But don't talk about changing the game. The guy who owns the field will kick us all out if we do anything actually innovative. We're the players, you're the audience. We want our money from your tickets, and neither we, nor the guy who owns the field, cares if you actually see a good game. As long as the stadium's sold out, we really don't care if we forfeit the game before the coin toss."
...the US is so far behind the rest of the tech world when it comes to wireless technology, they cannot offer a tethering service because they don't have the infrastructure to do it. It has affected all carriers. If it was only poor planning on the part of one company, that would be understandable. Even if it was poor planning on the part of many companies, one at least could offer this great feature (at a realisitc price) and make a killing. But as it stands...no one can do it at anything close to a price that middle class Americans will pay. Links to the contrary are welcome.
Sorry about the mess.
Right now the Pre is US only so no right now you can not tether it if you are on a none US carrier since none of them carry it.
Tethering in the US seems to scar the daylights out of US carriers. Probably because the really want to sell you that data card with an extra line.
I don't know of any US provider that offers tethering. You could probably pull it off with an unlocked GSM phone on AT&T or maybe TMobile but I don't know if you can get a 3g Tmobile phone unlocked.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
People expect that when they buy an unlimited mobile internet plan that it should automatically be able to tether too. THe straight up fact is when you tether your mobile you WILL consume more bandwidth, period. The companies know this and charge accordingly. People seem to forget realities like this, just like the morons who expected a discount on the new Iphone a year into their contract. Iphones arent jsut given to ATT for free, they have a fixed cost, which is subsidized by continued cell service payments generally over a period of 2 years.
Good-bye
Indeed. Leave it to the marketing department at Palm to let out a story about something that the Pre cannot do and spin it so that all of a sudden the "underground" that will try to make it do what it cannot do are now some kind of elite hackers. Meanwhile, does anyone actually want one of these phones? If you want to tether your phone, why not buy one that can do that? T-Mobile allows it for BlackBerrys, for example...
Breakfast served all day!
I got a Centro a little while back and *Verizon* is A-OK with tethering. A short while before that I got a dongle but I hardly ever use it now, because Bluetooth tethering is so convenient.
Verizon doesn't support its tethering software on Mac OS X, but, no worries, you can set Bluetooth dialing up yourself.
BTW The Mac OS X EVDO script is terrible and broken. There's a MUCH better one floating around (I forget exactly which but I think it's the "PCS Intel EV-DO Modem Script"). Also, OS X's pppd likes to hang the computer occasionally (requiring a power button reboot), and Bluetooth dialing in general is flaky. But that's not Verizon's fault!
Tethering really is a killer smartphone app. Too bad providers are so self-centered, unimaginative, and stuck in the past that they can't let owners use it.
So I'll keep using my Centro with all its warts and random reboots, until, however many years from now, Verizon offers a better option.
Um...I pay Sprint $15 for tethering.
This is especially irritating because I was just starting to look around for an iPhone alternative that would allow tethering, background apps and no restrictive app store policies, etc. etc. all the reasons why the iPhone is essentially a nerfed technology demonstrator.
Here is a great case of the technology being far ahead of the networks that support it. I think some of the major device providers should get together and form a network that is designed from the ground up to support data first and voice second.
Here's a simple solution I offer to all carriers free of charge.
Write a custom tethering app for each phone, that starts a recording of the volume of data sent via tethering - give me a low price or free option for some smallish amount of data to be used via tethering, with some increasing tier thereafter.
This would satisfy 90% of people that just want to occasionally tether a laptop at a sucky hotel or airport.
People who want to use it as a primary ISP would of course be forced to pay more, and that is fine.
Could people work around it easily? Why yes they could, just as they can jailbreak these phones and get tethering for free. Isn't some money better than no money?
Would it record phone data as part of the tethering data? Yes it would but if you're tethering then you're mostly using a laptop, right?
Furthermore unreasonable tethering prices or locking down tethering will force a LOT more people to jailbreak phones (OK, not force, but greatly encourage). Along with that come all the other network hogging behaviors in addition to tethering you never get to charge for again.
Give us 90% of us a reasonable option for occasional tethering at low cost and everyone will be happy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why are other phone companies against tethering, or am I completely misunderstanding something?
Simply: they want you to pay for service, but they don't want you to really use it very much. They want to charge you a hefty fee for data access, and justify the price by saying it's "unlimited", but they really don't want you to use the service very much, because lots of people using it means they have to spend money to expand their infrastructure. If you can tether it to your computer, you'll probably use more bandwidth. Obviously they'd much prefer that you paid for their most expensive data plan and then never used it at all.
So should they still call their plan unlimited if it truly isn't unlimited? I tether my laptop to my G1 wherever I go, granted I only use it for routine browsing and SSH but my plan with T-Mobile includes unlimited data and I've never had a problem with them limiting me. Yes I know that no plan can truly be "unlimited" so why not simply cap a traditional broadband plan at 100GB per month or a mobile plan at 5GB? 95% of users wouldn't come close to those numbers and the companies could simply slow people down who go over.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
This is complete bullshit. Reverse engineering has always been legal in the US. Talking about in a public forum is likewise perfectly legal. No big media or telecom entity can do anything to stop it. If Palm doesn't like this they should have taken bigger steps to lock the phone down. The devs should proceed as normal and ignore the veiled threats from Palm.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Companies aren't selling goods and services any more, they seem to sell permissions and licenses. What these companies should be selling is a connection and that's it. It should be completely separate from the hardware, and they should not be able to dictate what hardware is allowed on their service, or what you do with your hardware. They should not be allowed to regulate what is transmitted on said line.
And there should be at least 40 of these companies, not four.
We need to block all these company mergers, and encourage more start ups to increase competition. And we need to create regulations for the market to stop this nickle and dime shit these companies are allowed to get away with, separating the service from the hardware in order to increase innovation and competition and give rights back to the consumer. These companies have too much power to dick over customers. Whatever happened to treating the customer like a valued customer in this country? Is every single major US company run by a half-assed dickhead who only knows how to make money by screwing customers?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I think that for a lot of people, they only require tethering very infrequently, such as where WiFi is unavailable of too expensive, and they need net access for their laptop. I would happily pay £5 for 24 hours, since I would likely only use it once a month at most. In the UK, O2 are offering £15 a month for iPhone tethering, but that's too much for the amount of use I would get out of it.
Maybe I'm just missing the point. But I see two use cases for tethering:
1. Once in a while you need net and the only thing that can do it is your phone. But most of the time WiFi does the trick. I can see wanting to do this with a smartphone but the carriers shouldn't have a problem with light use of this sort.
2. You are away from WiFi a lot, or want it as a primary connection. If you have a netbook or laptop handy most of the time why did you get a smartphone? If I were in that situation I'd want the smallest most phonelike phone I could get that supported bluetooth and tethering.
But AT&T Sprint seems to fear large numbers of customers people want to spend serious coin for oversized premium smartphones so they can leave them in their pocket and bang away on a laptop, sucking up gigs of bandwidth they meter by the GB anyway.
Democrat delenda est
The most important question is "How is this Apple's fault?" I'm sure there's a reason!
None of those phones are very popular.
I will note in passing that each HTC model seems to sell between 1-2m each. Not a huge amount, but HTC does have a lot of different units available, and replaces them around eveyr 12-18 months or so. According to Gartner's most recent report, Apple's share of the smartphone market was ~11%, while HTC's was ~6%.
I will say that I was without wired Internet for a week while AT&T tried and failed miserably to install U-Verse. Apparently the 40-year-old rat-chewed internal copper wiring can't take VDSL. Who'd have thought so? Anyway, I cranked up the old Sprint Mogul (HTC Titan) and tethered it, rebroadcasting the 3G signal as WiFi and BT using WMWiFiRouter. Over WiFi, I was able to get up to around ~1.5/.5 Mbps, after initially being frustrated with ~250/50 Kbps. It seems to be very sensitive to phone position and signal strength, and also elevation.
The best thing about this is that the tethering ability is available within the $30/month all-in SERO plan (as long as I use a suitable proxy to disguise the phone usage). Sprint's main problem compared to AT&T and Verizon is that is is so damn cheap and it has found it difficult to raise prices like them and increase the ARPU. I think with the Pre, it wants to can tethering until it's more certain it can successfully and reliably charge a premium for it.
Da Blog
Cows ?
I agree with the idea of a 24-hour or 48-hour tethering access plan. Most of the time I'm somewhere that there is free or cheap internet access for my laptop, but occasionally I've been somewhere where I've used tethering on my old Sony-Ericsson phone to get online for some quick browsing, such as making an on-line hotel reservation. I really don't need a monthly plan for tethering, as I've had the need maybe 4 to 5 times a year on the average. And I've not had tethering at all for the 11 months I've had my iPhone.
As nice as the browser in my iPhone is, sometimes I can just do things quicker or easier using my laptop's browser.
That's funny. When I got my W490 T-Mobile was quite happy to try to sell me an internet package which would allow me to use bluetooth from my laptop to my phone to access the Internet. Maybe that's not called "tethering", but that would seem to fit the definition I've seen.
quite clear that the unlimited mobile internet plan can only be used on the mobile device
Can you explain exactly what it means to "use" bandwidth? Because the argument can certainly be made that only the phone is using it. It's the only thing talking with the carrier, right?
HDSPA tethering in Japan on Docomo's network costs $8 as a base fee, and then $50 up to 50MB of data. Then it goes up from there to a cap of $100 for 100MB. After 100MB, the charge does not increase. This is for up to 7.2Mbps
Sure. Or they can add a routine to their firmware that looks for this type of connection and, when detected, cripple the phone. I grabbed a 3G iphone the week they were jailbroke and ran one of the socks proxy programs that was available. The iphone would not charge when data was being passed through the socks proxy. I could have the data connection active and do all the streaming audio I wanted on the phone through Pandora (hours and hours and hours) and it charged fine. But, as soon as I started putting data through the socks proxy, the phone stopped taking external power. Tried a number of socks proxys (all that were available at the time) and the behavior was the same. Data passing to/from the phone = battery charges. Data passing THROUGH the phone = no charging. Just having a telnet session open was enough to disable charging. So active tethering sessions were limited to a few hours. That may not sound like a big deal but it really kills the phone. A couple hours of tethered access and the battery's almost dead and you can't swap it out even if you were willing to schlep around extra batteries.
This is much more devious than making such use outright impossible. Since most people don't know what the heck they're doing, they won't be able to troubleshoot and isolate the problem. Maybe they'll think tethering just takes too much power and that's why it's not supported. [cough]bullshit[/cough] AT&T and Apple get to keep their revenue stream while the customer gets conditioned to avoid the behavior AT&T dislikes. The customer give up on tethering or only use it as a last resort.
I took the phone back after a few days of testing my charging theory. Currently using a Blackjack 2 which had to be mildly hacked to restore band selection and a couple other options. Tethered 8-10 hours a day as a method of external access testing.
I don't understand why the phone operators don't just charge for the traffic.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They're making money because you're now paying for 2 data plans plus 1 tethering plan rather than one of each. If you're geek enough to want tethering, you're also going to want data on your phone for those times when it's not worth the hassle of lugging a laptop. So instead of adding the tethering option to your phone's data plan, you're adding the $50-60 plan for a cellular card/dongle.
Using AT&T prices:
The cheapest phone/text/data/tethering plan runs around $105/month. 450 minutes, minimal text package, unlimited (5 gigs) data, tethering.
The cheapest phone/text/data plan runs around $60/month. The DataConnect plan is $60/month. That's a total of $120/month.
AT&T gets an extra $15/month, $180/year, $360/contract. It's not the cards that they care about. It's the monthly bill. The cards can't cost them much at all in the quantities that they purchase.
Well, the fact that no Sprint or Best Buy can keep them in stock might be a clue to their popularity. The waiting list at the Niagara Falls Blvd. store in Amherst NY is two weeks long.
Thankfully I work in downtown Buffalo. The Sprint store on Main Street there apparently has received (and has been promised) the single largest stock of Palm Pre's of ANY store in the continental United States (according to the store owner, who happened to be in the store the day I visited) and THEY can't keep them in stock for more than a day at a time.
Sales are so brisk that it takes an hour and a half just to enable the phone as Sprint's activation servers are so backed up with Pre activations.
So yeah, I'd say sales are brisk, and lots of people want the Pre.
Oh, and I am absolutely LOVING my Pre, although I have no plans to set up tethering. I frankly don't need it with the internet capabilities of the Pre.
Most mind boggling experience so far? Listening to Pandora radio jacked into my Jeep stereo while driving home today. Just... freaky cool!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
You can tether without root access, http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/, I think this is the App T-mo pulled,If T-mo is blocking it then go directly to the source. It's still available in Australia and Europe where the government tells the telco's they cant control what we do on our phones.
Also, you think that's heat, where I live it's 35 Degree's Celcius, and its winter here.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.