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AT&T Cracking Down On Unofficial iPhone Tethering
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T is sending warning notifications to jailbroken iPhone users who use unofficial tethering methods like MyWi and PDANet. 'Customers are being notified that their service plans need updating to subscribe to a tethering plan, and that they will be automatically subscribed to a DataPro 4GB package that costs an additional $45 per month if they continue to tether.'"
Do Americans know that no one else in the world does this? Not in Europe, not in Asia. They sell you the service and you use it how you want.
O2 in the UK charge £7.50/mo for a tethering + 500MB bolt-on for consumer tariffs (you can't buy the tethering without the additional data). I believe 3 offer it free, but not sure about others.
If you look at your bill, it shows how much data per day and when the sessions started and stopped. Short sessions are not counted separately, rather grouped into the previous or next major session. I tether, and I just checked my bill, currently about 2.5 g per month is what I am running on the high side.
here is a sample from a few days of use last month..
336 MON 01/31/2011 9:23AM Data Transfer Data 222,366 KB DPPB AT GPRR Out 0.00
337 MON 01/31/2011 11:30AM Data Transfer Data 75,889 KB DPPB AT GPRR Out 0.00
338 MON 01/31/2011 11:02PM Data Transfer Data 513 KB DPPB AT GPRR Out 0.00
339 TUE 02/01/2011 12:02AM Data Transfer Data 4,323 KB DPPB AT GPRR Out 0.00
340 WED 02/02/2011 8:27AM Data Transfer Data 38,168 KB DPPB AT GPRR Out 0.00
341 WED 02/02/2011 11:32AM Data Transfer Data 107,778 KB DPPB AT GPRR Out 0.00
342 WED 02/02/2011 2:50PM Data Transfer Data 38,417 KB DPPB AT GPRR Out 0.00
Even if I was streaming pandara all day, and surfing the internet, and using various network aware apps and youtube (which would conflict with pandora from an audio standpoint), it would still be hard to hit 220 meg between say 930am and 1130am on lines 336 and 337.
That would be a dead giveaway. They would not even have to use deep packet inspection to pull agent strings, or anything.
But like someone else said, they are probably just going to hit people that use exorbitant amounts of bandwidth, although as a security person, I could easily develop something automated to find the majority of those tethering without any human interaction required..
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Indeed, how do Americans fall for this stuff while people in other nations seem to be able to get better deals? Are we really just that dumb?
Not that much. The "will happily pay thousands of dollars because they're giving me a free phone now" is possible thanks to a logical fallacy called "hyperbolic discounting" -- the article in the link refers to lab animals, but it's proven that it works on humans, too. Simpler descriptions here and here. Of course it's being exploited and used as a marketing method since years. ;) but this marketing technique is so widespread we don't even notice anymore.
And: not only Americans fall for this, and endless businesses all around the world use this trick to, well, screw us. We Europeans just like to think we are smarter than the yanks
Mostly harmless.
Tethering without a tethering plan breaches your contract, so they can refuse to provide service, request you pay more for your plan, or do about anything.
The tethering app makes the network level requests look like they are coming from the phone because they are, but the application level packet data can easily enough be looked at to determine what type of traffic it actually is.
T-Mobile offers the SIM-only "Even More Plus" plan, a cheaper plan designed for people who have bought a phone separately. Last time I checked, the discount was 10 USD off voice or 20 USD off voice and data. So do I understand correctly that you can't get T-Mobile where you live?