Verizon Cracks Down On Jailbreak Tethering

tekgoblin writes "Verizon, like AT&T has now started blocking jailbroken phones from using un-sanctioned tethering apps. Verizon will now require users to be subscribed to a mobile tethering plan to be able to use tethering at all." So which mobile company's actually any good for 3G tethering, voice service aside? My Virgin Mobile MiFi (bought under a plan no longer available) is theoretically unlimited and "only" $40/month, but has had too much downtime for my taste, and atrocious customer service.

Comments

How do they tell?

[jsnipy]

How do they even tell tethered traffic from non?

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Highly illegal deep packet inspection. :) It breaks a ton of privacy laws put in place by the Fed AND local governments.

Re:How do they tell?

[geekboybt]

I'd imagine that traffic from a desktop/laptop is far different from that of a mobile phone. For starters, significant amounts of HTTP traffic with a user agent from Windows/Mac/Linux would be a tipoff. Not saying it's foolproof or the only way, for sure, but that would be one easy way to narrow down the list.

Re:How do they tell?

[SwedishChef]

They may be looking at browser tags and anything that doesn't come standard on an un-jailbroken cell phone would be considered an unauthorized tether. But that's just a guess. And, of course, it can easily be spoofed.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it looks at th packet's TTL value. Traffic from the phone has one value and traffic originating elsewhere has that value -1. At least that's what I read someplace.

Re:How do they tell?

[sunderland56]

Assuming they are doing it by packet inspection: Just run a strongly encrypted VPN to your home server, and use that internet connection. All Verizon will see is VPN traffic, which is legal.

Re:How do they tell?

[spyder-implee]

That's an interesting point, I wonder (if that were the case) what their position would be if you have a netbook with a cellular device built-in, and use it for voice and data? Would your data end up getting blocked because of a non-mobile user agent?

Re:How do they tell?

[schnikies79]

You can change user-agents on browsers available in the Apple app store. They even provide an official API for doing it.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they even tell tethered traffic from non?

They cant really. A packet destined for a smartphone is exactly the same as a packet destined for a desktop. I imagine they will be looking for traffic that couldn't be originated from a smartphone (online gaming, etc...). My personal belief is that this type of thing should be covered under net neutrality.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have anyone tried to do VPN at the phone level? iPhone ---> VPN connection to home server.

And then tethering from the other devices through the iphone's VPN?

That way, there should not be a need to set-up VPN on multiple devices.

Re:How do they tell?

[chucklebutte]

My Blackberry browser allows me to choose how I am represented to websites i.e. IE, Firefox, or Blackberry... Also tethering comes with Blackberry desktop manager, and is enabled by default if bluetooth is enabled....

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Verizon's tethering is so terrible as to be almost unuseable. It's one of the only things that I've ever requested a refund for after having attempted and failed at using it. Verizon tethering simply wouldn't stay up for more than a couple minutes for me. The reason for that seems to be that it creates some sort of tunnel or vpn to a verizon server and that tunnel is prone to failure. It was seriously the most crappy piece of software that I've used in years.

That vpn/tunnel is probably how they tell if it's legitimately tethered or not.

Hopefully all people previously using free tethering will sign up for the legit tethering and then ask for a refund so vzw figures out that their method doesn't work well.

Re:How do they tell?

[sirsnork]

Phone based traffic is sent via their WAP gateway where as tethered traffic isn't, at least that's what someone said in a previous article on the subject. If thats true then all they need to do is monitor all non WAP traffic and compare where it's coming from against the people paying for tethering.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

No smartphone uses a WAP gateway. Direct access to the open internet is what makes full-featured web browsing and apps possible.

Re:How do they tell?

[Paradyme]

Assuming they are doing it by packet inspection: Just run a strongly encrypted VPN to your home server, and use that internet connection. All Verizon will see is VPN traffic, which is legal.

At the point that you connect to VPN using cell phone, it's semi-obvious you're tethering.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was true of non-smart phones half a decade ago.

AFAIK, the difference is in the NAI
tethered connections will have a number@dun.vzw3g.com
native connections have a number@vzw3g.com

If you can flash a custom ROM, or get into the NAM you should be able to change this behavior.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Phone based traffic is sent via their WAP gateway where as tethered traffic isn't, at least that's what someone said in a previous article on the subject. If thats true then all they need to do is monitor all non WAP traffic and compare where it's coming from against the people paying for tethering.

This is not true. WAP was for phones before they had browsers that could read full HTML. The WAP server acted as a proxy and converted the HTML down to a subset that the phones could handle. This stopping being true with the advent of modern smartphones that can do standard HTML.

While I can't say for sure, as they could be doing something I'm not aware of, my guess is it's just simple DPI which means the previous posters suggestion of using your tether to make a VPN tunnel back to your home router/server should work. Might need to check for client sigs in VPN tunnel setup as a laptop client like Cisco AnyConnect might give itself away durning initial tunnel setup.

However if you run up the bytes I'm guessing you'll still hear from them.

Re:How do they tell?

[Calos]

Eh, I don't think so. I've set up a VPN for use from my phone and I don't tether. I just don't trust random open wifi networks, and feel semi-insecure doing things with sensitive info like banking without it.

Plus I have access to files at home, and all web traffic routed to my phone is filtered with Privoxy and compressed with Ziproxy.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T was possibly looking at the TTL value

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1140306

Re:How do they tell?

[mlts]

I use VPNs all the time on my cell phone, and never for tethering. I don't really trust most wireless networks out there, so having my traffic going through an encrypted tunnel out is something I do as a matter of routine. A lot of "free" Wi-Fi places also have ad injectors (a la Phorm) so having an encrypted link gets rid of third party meddling in what I am doing.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an interesting point, I wonder (if that were the case) what their position would be if you have a netbook with a cellular device built-in, and use it for voice and data? Would your data end up getting blocked because of a non-mobile user agent?

Your TOS only allow you to use devices validated as allowed their network so if you were using a cellular device in a netbook they would make sure you have the correct plan to go with it. Else if you are VERY cellular tech savy and just got some random cellular device to attach to their network on your account somehow(cloning?)then you would be in violation of your TOS for that plan and would hear from them.

If a simple way to do this came about and came into even moderate use it would scare them enough that I guaranty they would come down with a huge hammer. As in likely criminal hacking prosecutions for a few to make examples of them.

Re:How do they tell?

[Calos]

Aside from browser ID strings - which as others mentioned are easily spoofed - traffic patterns are probably just as identifiable. If I were to tether from my computer, it's not just browser traffic they would see. My mail client would be reaching out checking for updates, Dropbox would keep checking for changes and syncing, as would Evernote... This is probably especially true for Windows users: antivirus traffic, Windows update traffic... Youtube videos could be loaded that otherwise wouldn't on a mobile device. Short, high-bandwidth bursts of traffic are more likely from a tethered desktop than a phone - in Chrome I often load up 6-8 of the pages in my home tab on start, simultaneously. That's hard to do in a mobile browser. Even the user agent string is a good indication - who browses everything with a user agent set to a desktop on a mobile device? Sure, it's useful at times, if a site is misbehaving, but most often the mobile versions of pages are better for mobile devices. If they see a whole session of browsing with a desktop user agent, yeah, they'll probably be suspicious.

And your browser reports more than what browser it is, what version, what OS. They generally report information on plugins and fonts and compatibilities, too, which can be very unique and easily identifiable: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be very easy for any network engineer with a familiarity of tcpdump/snoop et al to determine PC traffic from a cell phone. I can easily rattle off heuristics (without much thought) from the obvious: connecting to a Warcraft server, browser ID (yes easily spoofed, but can add to the evidence), hosting a Quake server, heck even monitoring the general speed of web browsing/AJAX requests (dozens of tabs open = contacting multiple web servers in seconds?). To the more esoteric: OS fingerprinting. Removing the human element and automating something like that, however, would be more difficult and error prone I imagine.

Re:How do they tell?

[Hodapp]

I'm told they do it by examining the TTL of the packets, as in most cases packets through a tethered device will have a lower TTL than any traffic coming from the device itself.

Re:How do they tell?

[tlhIngan]

How do they even tell tethered traffic from non?

Easy.

First, a little background.

A cellphone data connection goes through a gateway. It's not a traditional TCP/IP link, but it sure looks like one from the mobile side. What happens is the TCP/IP packets are encapsulated by the modem, forwarded to the base station, and the base station determines which gateway to use.

In GSM, the gateway is chosen by the APN you enter (or your phone automatically uses). CDMA is different, but it effectively looks up the gateway for you.

The gateway does things depending on the plan you buy. Consider the entirety of data plans available - unlimited "social networking" for feature phones, unlimited data for blackberries, gigs and gigs for smartphones, 1-2GB for laptop, each of which is increasing in price. The reason for this is service differentiation. The lowest and cheapest plan probably uses well defined proxy servers that only forward to specific hosts. The blackberry plans go to specific blackberry networks. The smartphone plans often have stuff like transparent proxying (caching plus stuff like recompression), firewalling (HTTP/HTTPS/SMTP/POP/IMAP only is typical), NAT (multiple layers).

Laptop data plans (MiFi's and the like) often stick you behind a simple NAT, but are otherwise free from other firewalling. And if you pony up $$$, you can often get VPN plans that give you a real life IP address and no firewalling.

Guess what? These firewalls also note what traffic isn't making it thorugh. Various ping probes, odd port traffic, stuff like that gets logged. Use a Windows machine and it's easy from traffic that no smartphone will ever generate.

Those who use their phone as a modem (PC does TCP/IP) are the first to trigger the alerts, those who use SSH-SOCKS (phone does TCP/IP) are harder to tell (all packets originate from phone, traffic not using proxy isn't seen), in which case they have to see if connections are made to odd ports and the like (e.g., if you try to ssh to a host).

Other techniques are a bit of packet identification and link utilization - you can easily tell a smartphone from a PC just by the way the browsers create network traffic, for example (especially with smartphone plan transparent proxies)

You think carriers are stupid for selling 2GB laptop plans when you can get 5GB smartphone plans for half the price?

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. One the of most common forms(we use it) of enterprise VPN these days is SSL VPN. Once the tunnel is setup it deff would be indistinguishable from an HTTPS connection or other SSL connection. And iPhone includes such SSL clients. Others too I think.

However the first few packets of tunnel setup *may* give away the nature of the connection or that a desktop client is initiating the connection. I'd have to look at some packet caps of tunnel setup before I could say for sure. Never looked at from this point of view.

Likely better / more full proof solution would be to kick off the VPN tunnel from your phone back to a VPN server and then tunnel laptop traffic over that tunnel. There would be no way to know that traffic had not originated on the phone other than possibly heuristic analysis which would not be definitive(little out of my depth on that one). I have done this before though only once or twice to get on my corp network in a pinch.

Re:How do they tell?

[boilednut]

On AT&T's network at least, the iPhone, even jail-broken ones typically, sends its tethering traffic to a different APN (AT&T access point). Making it very easy to detect when an iOS device is tethering unofficially. Android doesn't segregate its tethering traffic like iOS -- which makes it much more cost prohibitive to detect its tethering traffic; consequently, because of this, and because the number of Android devices on AT&T's network is dwarfed by that of iOS devices, it's likely that Android devices will be excluded from the crack down.

Re:How do they tell?

[the_humeister]

Those who use their phone as a modem (PC does TCP/IP) are the first to trigger the alerts, those who use SSH-SOCKS (phone does TCP/IP) are harder to tell (all packets originate from phone, traffic not using proxy isn't seen), in which case they have to see if connections are made to odd ports and the like (e.g., if you try to ssh to a host).

My phone can ssh to places (Cyanogenmod 7). There are also apps in the Android and Apple app stores that ssh too. How do they tell that vs. a tethered computer using ssh?

Re:How do they tell?

[Totenglocke]

Not true. Many workplaces require your phone to be on their VPN in order to access email (for security reasons).

Re:How do they tell?

[Totenglocke]

Sprint doesn't seem to care if you tether for free. I think that's why they just added the $10 "premium data fee" as a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" kind of deal. I tether on 4G as much as possible because Sprint doesn't monitor your 4G usage, but I've also done quite a bit of tethering on 3G (as have friends) and Sprint hasn't done a thing about it.

Re:How do they tell?

[Tuxedo Jack]

It depends on the device you're using.

In Android and Windows Mobile 6.5/6.1/5, your NAI (network access identifier) changes based upon the type of traffic you're pushing. Tethered traffic and DUN changes your NAI to yournumber@dun.vzw3g.com. Traffic from the phone itself is simply yournumber@vzw3g.com.

Verizon has poisoned EVERY phone with Gingerbread - they have modified the OS so that activating any hotspot app, even if the phone is rooted, to trigger the NAI change and show the phrase "Tethering or Hotspot Active." The only SAFE way to tether on a Verizon phone is to run Froyo, then use free-wifi-tether's 3.x version. Alternatively, install CyanogenMod and then you can tether.

For iOS? Hell, you're screwed any way you turn.

Re:How do they tell?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I believe it looks at th packet's TTL value. Traffic from the phone has one value and traffic originating elsewhere has that value -1.

If so that's easy to spoof (assuming initial value from the phone isn't the field max) by hacking the tethered device to start with a higher TTL.

You could also hack the phone to bump up the TTL of the toward-network forwarded packet - at the risk of immortalizing a looping packet (which is what TTL exists to prevent).

Re:How do they tell?

[james_a_craig]

You mean some way, like, say, swapping SIM cards as is commonplace in europe, or on any of the GSM networks in the states, for that matter?

Re:How do they tell?

[hairyfeet]

Or here is an even better idea, how about you don't use your cell phone for the damned Internet and instead either use the Wifi which is all over the damned place or wait until you get home?

Everyone is just gonna have to face some cold hard facts, like 1.-the carriers have oversubscribed like mad and frankly their towers can't take it, and 2.-unlike land lines we can't just run bigger pipes.

Hell we may already be royally fucking ourselves by killing off the honey bees with some of the freqs we are already using and yet like greedy children all I hear is "more more more!". I travel plenty across the south and while I can't speak for the rest of the country I can say that down here most of the towers are so damned overloaded by fucking iPhones that bars don't mean shit and one of my fastest growing services is putting in "mini-towers" that plug into your cable or DSL just so people can bypass the tower bullshit when they are at home (because God fricking forbid they should put down the damned iPhone and use a home phone when AT HOME, oh perish the fricking thought).

To use a line from one of the best engineers ever "She just can't take no more!". The towers are overloaded, the phone services are rapidly turning into shit, the cell phone simply wasn't made for everybody and their damned dog to be watching videos and surfing their asses off on iPhones. So why not put down the damned iPhone and just use the fricking Wifi which is actually MADE for that shit, how about that? Hell the iPhone does have Wifi doesn't it? Because one thing I've learned is that iPhone junkies would rather take a baseball bat to the nuts than put that damned thing down. I'd love to see a chart comparing cell service quality before and after iPhone, because I bet the quality level goes to shit like a turd thrown off the Empire state Building when iPhone hit the scene.

Re:How do they tell?

[wickedskaman]

Lemme guess... you are lots of fun a parties.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

My phone can ssh to places (Cyanogenmod 7). There are also apps in the Android and Apple app stores that ssh too. How do they tell that vs. a tethered computer using ssh?

If you look on the IP stream, you can tell from which operating system it originates. You can look on the start of the seuqnce number, on the timing of the TCP handshake and so on. But I dont't think the phone companies do this. They just block you or shape your traffic when you use "hacker tools" like ssh. If you complain, you get either kicked out or they try to sell you a more expensive plan.

Re:How do they tell?

[SuperKendall]

If WiFi were REALLY all over the place, I wouldn't need to tether. But it's not.

Or rather, lots of times it is but it sucks. I'd say about half the airports I've been in I can do a lot better with the network connection from my phone than the airport WiFi. Hotel WiFi can be equally terrible, though generally that is faster - but if you were silly enough to go to a more expensive hotel you'll also pay through the nose for an internet plan (that may still suck!!!) so lots of times it's simply more prudent to tether.

Honestly, for what you get tethering plans are not THAT expensive. And at least with AT&T, you can turn it on and off easily and pay a pro-rated amount for the days you had it enabled - just make sure not to crest the data cap if you disable the tethering plan early...

Re:How do they tell?

[shiloh.sharps]

Verizon tethering works fine for me. I'm surprised it does as my home location is at a extended network location. I use RDC so maybe that's it.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who use their phone as a modem (PC does TCP/IP) are the first to trigger the alerts, those who use SSH-SOCKS (phone does TCP/IP) are harder to tell (all packets originate from phone, traffic not using proxy isn't seen), in which case they have to see if connections are made to odd ports and the like (e.g., if you try to ssh to a host).

My phone can ssh to places (Cyanogenmod 7). There are also apps in the Android and Apple app stores that ssh too. How do they tell that vs. a tethered computer using ssh?

We're sorry Sir, but you are in violation of your subscriber agreement by connecting a device to our network which is running non-approved OS software. We are unable to process any support requests until such a time as you have your device replaced or repaired at any of our convenient customer service locations.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe so - but what is to stop them from profiling VPN traffic and vlocking it, citing internet service the phone is only for websites or select services?

I've had a customer rep try to dismiss incoming services on a 3G line as not possible because the IP changes too frequently, which poses no problems for loading websites. The 3G service is only for websites and this is all we are sold on a phone.

Turns out the issue was modem firmware (supplied by said provider, with no fix either), but I'm sure many other people have many more examples of service providers saying one thing and providing a far more limited version at the end.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

A flag in the GPRS stream, it tell's wheter the traffic originated inside the phone. If the flag is not there it was generated outside (and no, there's no way to set this without having complete access to the radio-firmware)...

Re:How do they tell?

[gatzke]

Even apps from outside the market? PDAnet is not from the market and I have not seen a message about tethering. They also have a "stealth mode" to hide your usage, but I bet you can't hide the traffic pattern a laptop generates.

Would Tether + VPN on the laptop work?

Maybe I need to check and see if Verizon will let me turn on and off tethering easily. If so, I don't mind paying a little for that feature, but I doubt they make it easy or cheap.

Re:How do they tell?

[blackest_k]

this is insane.

I used to have a 3g modem on contract with 3 mobile (known as hutchinson telecom in other parts of the world)
till they screwed me over for going over my plan. however the prepay is excellent value for money i now use my sim in a samsung galaxy europa (2.1 android cost â90 for the phone)which has a 7.2 megabyte modem built in I pay â20 a month and use â4.99 of that to buy 500 mb of data. They also give me free skype for 30 days 3000 texts to use any time and 3000 minutes of calls for the weekends.

If I had any need for more data i can switch the sim card to the 3G modem if I really want but to be honest I don't need too. I tend to use barnacle if I want to use my archos7 (2.1 android based and â119.99 at carphone warehouse) or my AspireOne netbook running ubuntu.

The phone although small is quite capable yesterday with the free winamp app i was streaming shoutcast stations and playing them on my car radio via bluetooth (128k streams suffer from drop out in the country when travelling at 60 mph / 100 kmh lower bit rate stations are fine). I also use the free google navigation from time to time which can direct me to the nearest fast food joint (handy when you need to take a leak after driving the last 2 hours getting to an unfamiliar city).

Oh and 2 days ago i got a text message from the network provided i top up by â20 a month they are now going to give me unlimited data and free calls to other users on their network.

This is in Ireland but they do similar things in other countries. My uncle in Galway flew to Australia and had the rather pleasant experience of being able to use Australia's 3 network at Irish prices (a scheme called like home which unfortunately has ended).

Maybe the problem is in the contracts people sign? I personally wouldn't sign a contract with a mobile phone company again, even with 3 who obviously I like. They did sting me for an extra â100 for going over my data plan on contract which more than wiped out the cost saving over a prepay modem

I have heard of worse cases one woman it was â300 for out of plan data not something she could easily afford compared to the â20 a month she usually paid.

  I am pretty sure I have the best deal in ireland but there are o2 vodaphone eirecom meteor and others. I can take my number with me across networks and have my phone unlocked legally by my carrier.
By being prepay my carrier has to look after me or i walk simple as that. If you want to be treated as a valued customer then perhaps you should end your contract when it finishes and go to prepay being tied to a contract really does make you your providers bitch.
  (prices are in euro's but are close enough to be american dollar prices unfortunately slashdot chews up the euro symbol)

Re:How do they tell?

[stating_the_obvious]

I do this all the time. Easy-Peazy. Soekris box at home running M0n0wall with free DynDNS service to solve my dynamic IP address problem. Not only does this solve the tethering packet inspection problem, but the hardware also makes public wifi access inherently safer.

Re:How do they tell?

[petermgreen]

Afaict verizon is CDMA so they have to register any devices onto the network (unlike with GSM where you can drop your SIM into any device) so presumablly they would only allow such a device to be registered on an appropriate plan.

Re:How do they tell?

[petermgreen]

There are lots of clues

User agents would be a clue (IIRC some mobile browsers spoof those but it wouldn't surprise me if there are subtule differences between the commonly spoofed strings and the common ones on desktops). There is likely other information in the http request that differs too.
If the tethering software was making the phone act as a nat router TTLs and other TCP/IP options could be a clue
If the tethering software worked by loading a proxy on the phone then an x-forwarded for header could be a clue
Large downloads would be a clue, so would very high overall data use.
As you say traffic from application that don't exist on the phone would be an especially damning clue

Afaict most mobile phone contracts have a clause allowing termination for any or no reason whatsoever so they don't exactly need absolute proof that someone is teathering to send them a "cease or pay up" letter with a threat of disconnection.

Re:How do they tell?

[JWSmythe]

Actually, the tethering ability is controlled by the provider. Sprint and Boost block the native ability to tether. Tether (previously known as TetherBerry) does work around that, but all of your internet traffic is relayed through their server in California. He hasn't opened it up to allow you to use the relay server of your choice.

    I've used it for a while with my Windows laptop and Blackberry on Boost. it works very well. The speed is usually very good. I only use it when I really need it though, so they won't cut me for 20 minutes a month of tethering. :)

    I picked up a Barnes & Noble Nook Color the other day, and of course converted it to be a full fledged Android system. It works great at the house, but I couldn't find a way to tether it to my Blackberry. It looks like I'll be switching over to an Android phone soon, so I can tether it. The Nook makes a pretty nice little tablet, which will be nice to travel with. I hate trying to use my laptop on an airplane. Even in first class (I'm the king of upgrades), it's a bit tight for a big laptop.

Re:How do they tell?

[NJRoadfan]

Well it helps that most of Verizon's phones are still stuck on 2.2, since they like to take their time approving firmware updates.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the next logical question is: can you make laptop network traffic look superficially like smartphone traffic? I realize this is going to be rather more complicated than merely setting a User-Agent string, but are there tools to do it or can something be cobbled together?

Re:How do they tell?

[kiwix]

Man, I'm glad I live in a country where I can have an unlimited data plan for 19 EUR, with a public IP adress (not a fixed address, though), mostly no filtering, and I can use any damn phone I want with any OS I want. Granted, the country is small (Luxembourg) so the cost of operating the network is kinda lower, but still...

Anyway, I'm not sure how they could tell the difference between my smartphone and my PC: my smartphone is a N900, which runs a Linux TCP/IP stack, and mostly the same programs as a desktop Linux: I routinely use ssh, empathy (for VoIP), ping, and nmap on the phone, and sometimes I run OpenVPN and rtorrent (not necessarily together).

Re:How do they tell?

[CProgrammer98]

whoa, that's rather bitter.

I commute 20 miles each way on the train and work right in the city centre. Guess what, no wi-fi anywhere from me stepping out my door at home to arriving back again. The train service is a branch line, so no wifi there. OK, there's free wifi for the 2 minutes I'm transiting the train station in the city but other than that.. nada.

At home, why pay for two phone services when I can get unlimited texts and near unlimited free calls on my iPhone plan. More and more people are ditching their landlines in favour of the cell phone plan, or even skype.

so yeah, the smartphone is becoming ubiquitous but to say people should stop using it because the towers can't cope is ridiculous, They need to build more and bigger towers. They can afford it with the money they rake in from users. (e.g. Roaming charges, though getting better, are ridiculous)

Stop being so bitter

Re:How do they tell?

[PortHaven]

Simple, you successfully load and play Flash on an iPhone. They know you're tethered. LOL

Re:How do they tell?

[todrules]

But there's more than just browsers. I think playing World of Warcraft might give it away.

Re:How do they tell?

[PortHaven]

"Or here is an even better idea, how about you don't use your cell phone for the damned Internet and instead either use the Wifi which is all over the damned place or wait until you get home?"

Why don't you just go a step further and stay of the internet completely. It'd probably do you some good.

The issue, is when we pay $200 for unlimited service, which seldom is unlimited, and then have further limits. Consumer's get annoyed. When said corporations are fueled by government endorsed monopolies there is little for consumers to do but vent and maybe called a Congressmen or two.

Lastly, now that we've been relegated from unlimited data to 2 gb of data. It shouldn't make a damnable difference how we use our 2gb of data. Sorry, if we're already annoyed by the fact that text messages are the most over-priced commodity in the world.

Re:How do they tell?

[PortHaven]

Oh, and let me add that I almost never come across free/open WiFi outside the likes of McDonald's or Panera's.

Re:How do they tell?

[Rich0]

I'd love to see Cyanogenmod have better VPN support, whether I use tether or not.

Right now you can connect to a VPN, but only traffic for hosts on the VPN is transferred over the VPN.

I'd like an arrangement where 100% of all my phone's traffic (controlled at the OS level) is sent through the VPN. My home broadband can easily handle the data a phone will generate, and I'm not concerned with a little extra latency with what I do.

There is an openvpn setting that is supposed to do something like this, but it apparently even sends DHCP traffic through the VPN which means you'll lose your lease (and it is fussy to set up anyway). Plus, if the VPN link drops it will just send traffic over the normal network interface, which means you lose privacy on whatever you were sending.

I would think from an implementation standpoint all it needs to do is:
1. Create a VPN tunnel on a network interface (all VPN software does this already).
2. Make the VPN tunnel the default route (just a routing table change).
3. Use netfilter/etc to block all but carefully-selected traffic to the phone's real ethernet interface. The VPN service obviously needs access, as does the DHCP service.
4. Ensure that there are no leaks if the VPN goes down for a minute (user-controllable setting) - making sure the firewall rules don't get torn down if the VPN service hiccups is all that should require.

Then all the provider gets is a big stream of VPN traffic and some DHCP packets. No way to steal cookies, insert ads, track behavior, or violate net-neutrality. They can charge by the GB and they can count how many GB I use, so there is no theft of service.

Re:How do they tell?

[Verteiron]

Highly illegal deep packet inspection. :) It breaks a ton of privacy laws put in place by the Fed AND local governments.

Actually there is no federal or state law on the book that restricts the use of DPI by service providers. Using DPI to route traffic DOES place at risk their "Safe harbor" status under the DMCA. Unfortunately, since ISPs are now agreeing to be the private police force for copyright holders that no longer matters.

Re:How do they tell?

[LVSlushdat]

If WiFi were REALLY all over the place, I wouldn't need to tether. But it's not.

Or rather, lots of times it is but it sucks. I'd say about half the airports I've been in I can do a lot better with the network connection from my phone than the airport WiFi. Hotel WiFi can be equally terrible, though generally that is faster - but if you were silly enough to go to a more expensive hotel you'll also pay through the nose for an internet plan (that may still suck!!!) so lots of times it's simply more prudent to tether.

Honestly, for what you get tethering plans are not THAT expensive. And at least with AT&T, you can turn it on and off easily and pay a pro-rated amount for the days you had it enabled - just make sure not to crest the data cap if you disable the tethering plan early...

Like McDonalds? I often hit up MCD's for lunch, and I can't say if its every MCD, but the only I frequent has broken-dialup grade wifi.. To start with, don't EVEN bother to try to stream ANYTHING.. OR vpn/ssh... I recall hitting this same MCD before the wifi become free, back when you paid $2.95 for two hours. The connection was rock-sold, and I recall watching a youtube video on my personal laptop that I could not watch on my work network. No rebuffers, just like my home cable connection.. Now that its free, rebuffers every 2 seconds, complete dropouts where the attwifi signal just goes away and then comes back a minute or so later.. vpn/ssh is equally a joke. Now I use my Samsung phone tethered via bluetooth when in that blighted eatery...

Re:How do they tell?

[LVSlushdat]

I have a Samsung phone on VirginMobile on their $25/mo 300 anytime minutes and "unlimited" data/text plan, and tether it often via pdanet. Works like a champ when I need acesss and and there is either no wifi or VERY crappy wifi (like McDonalds or to a lesser extent Starbucks)...

Re:How do they tell?

[deains]

This is about tethering though. You wouldn't bother wiring up a laptop to your 3G-connected phone when there's a Wi-Fi hotspot around. So it really comes down to whether you trust the 3G network. And if the traffic itself is secure (SSL-ed), you should be able to trust 3G just as much as you do a wired network.

Re:How do they tell?

[AJH16]

I've yet to find a hotel or free wifi hotspot that had better internet than my 3G connection in both terms of latency and bandwidth. This says nothing of 4G. Also, why does Europe not have these problems? As I understand it they have higher population density and cheaper cell service (though perhaps also better Wifi coverage and maybe that is the answer.) That all said, I will use whatever the best available connection is. If it is wifi, I will use that. If it is cellular, I will use that.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, when I'm on an untrusted network the first thing I like to do is dial into the network where I keep all my important documents and files.

Re:How do they tell?

[djtachyon]

Well my HTC Sensation 4G on T-Mobile came with completely non-crippled Gingerbread & Sense 3.0 (which is bearable). It comes with USB Tethering, Reverse USB Tethering (getting on PC's network), Wifi Hotspot, etc... No charges, and I get around 5Mbit downloads. Great phone in general!

Re:How do they tell?

[Remus Shepherd]

So you're saying that I, with my non-jailbroken, non-tethering phone, can get my service disconnected by using a SSH app?

Considering SSH is about the lowest-bandwidth service I can think of, I find this hard to believe. But it's something I'll be testing tonight. I use SSH on my Android phone all the time when I'm away from home.

Re:How do they tell?

[prezkennedy.org]

$200 for unlimited service? You're getting ripped off. I have unlimited service through Sprint that allows me to use a tethering app and it's all for $119.99 including tax.

Re:How do they tell?

[pacergh]

Verizon doesn't use SIM cards. It's CDMA.

Re:How do they tell?

[turbosaab]

Verizon 4G phones use SIM cards.

Re:How do they tell?

[Groo Wanderer]

Why bother when they can be arbitrary and capricious? They don't need to actually PROVE it, they can just find usage models they don't like, cut your *ss off, and tell you to get bent when you complain. And charge you for the privilege. I just moved to Sprint, and both an Epic 4G and a Photon + Easytether means USB tethering without jailbreaking. Easy enough.

I haven't bothered to jailbreak it because of time limits for now, maybe when 2.4 comes out or something I might care enough. Easytether requires a USB connection and a shell command to start, but that is about it, works like a charm. USB might not have the ease of wi-fi tethering, but it charges your phone rather than sucking it dry when you use it. :) That and it is easy enough.

                -Charlie

Re:How do they tell?

[bleh-of-the-huns]

I do this all the time (especially when I go to Vegas this time of year :)

It does require a rooted android phone for me, as I use openvpn and password protected certificates for authentication. I have an openvpn server that I run on my VPS and tunnel all the traffic through it when I am in some less then safe (network wise) places.

Outside of that, all iphones and androids support other ravious vpn technologies (curious why they never supported openvpn as an option natively).

As an aside note, if your not doing anything stupid while tethering, then you will most likely never be found out.. I stream pandora from my phone and computer (when tethered to my phone), I surf, I check email (exchange and outlook) as well as look at the occasional cat video on youtube..

What I do not do.. is watch TV, stream movies, download torrents, and all that other crap that uses significant amounts of bandwidth when I tether.. if you are that stupid, then you deserve to be caught.

Re:How do they tell?

[Groo Wanderer]

Because they charge the users a fair price for their services rather than offering pie-in-the-sky numbers that are so oversold it is laughable. Then they don't have to punishing you for trying to use what you bought because you are paying for it. That said, their prices are painful to us US folk.....

                -Charlie

Re:How do they tell?

[bkaul01]

Which leads to my workaround (effective on AT&T, at least):

On my Windows 7 laptop, I define the tethered connection as a "Public" network, and use the Advanced Firewall settings to make the default behavior for Public networks to be blocking all outgoing connections, except for what I whitelist. I then whitelist specific applications (Firefox, IE, Outlook), so I'm only allowing browser/email/IM traffic through while blocking things like Windows Update, Steam, etc. from generating obviously non-smartphone traffic. So far, it's worked.

Re:How do they tell?

[hairyfeet]

Oh yes because God fucking forbid the me generation can't have every God damned thing NOW NOW NOW! Did you even bother to read the link I posted? Are you gonna say "Well fuck them honey bees, what do we need them for besides...well food crops? Fuck them I got YouTubes LOL!".

Here are some simple facts, like them or lump them...1.-the carriers have MASSIVELY oversubscribed.2.- The freqs we are using now for 3G ARE killing bees, and 3.- to build the kind of MASSIVE tower rollout that will allow every smartphone carrying ass to blast through YouTube on 3G will cost TRILLIONS that the carriers are NOT gonna pay.

So here are your choices sparky, again like it or lump it...1.-Deal with horribly shitty service, missed calls, and general phone suckage, or 2.-Quit sucking down the damned 3G and actually be able to make calls!

While I pretend there are choices with my AMAZING physic powers let me predict what WILL happen, watch and be amazed! The ME ME ME NOW NOW NOW spoiled asses will keep slamming the living shit out of everything they get their hands on, because God fucking forbid they should have to wait until they get to work to see that kitteh video, the towers will be such overloaded about to fucking meltdown that service for ALL will go to absolute shit, and then the ME ME MEs will go "Waaaah, I can't get decent service, waaah!".

And THIS is why we can't have nice things. It is a classic "tragedy of the commons" sitch because when faced with a LIMITED common resource the douchebags WILL fuck it up for everybody else. like I said in most places in the south bars don't mean shit anymore, you can have 4 bars and be standing still and have the call dropped. Why? because right next to me is an iPhone user blowing through 3G liks shit through a goose!

So waste your modpoints, hide your little heads in the sand, and be sure to pretend reality doesn't exist! But that won't make 1+1=3, it won't magically get the teleco duopoly to spend trillions rolling out nationwide fiber to all the towers or buying up even more freqs, nor will it make the honeybees go 'Oh my bad, I didn't know you had to see teh kittehs!". like it or not like oil,like water, and like clean air there is a LIMITED AMOUNT of freqs and capacity, and it has ALREADY been massively oversold and is ALREADY causing environmental problems. But God fucking forbid the gimmie generation scale back on anything, God fucking forbid!

Re:How do they tell?

[chucklebutte]

I've only tested the feature, I just know it's there besides who really uses their smart/dumb phone for browsing the web? Tethered or not, if I really need to check something online, I can find a computer just about anywhere, its not 1995, online access is pretty universal now-a-days. (I said access, not speed!)

Re:How do they tell?

[tlhIngan]

So you're saying that I, with my non-jailbroken, non-tethering phone, can get my service disconnected by using a SSH app?

Considering SSH is about the lowest-bandwidth service I can think of, I find this hard to believe. But it's something I'll be testing tonight. I use SSH on my Android phone all the time when I'm away from home.

Alas, the honest answer is, "it depends." SSH may or may not be blocked by your carrier+plan combination, and if you're just doing interactive SSH, probably unlikely to trigger any sort of carrier alert (SSH packets are small and infrequent). But try to push it by doing SFTP transfers and you might trigger something.

It depends on your carrier's data policies and your data plan. Some carriers don't care and stick a plain old NAT (or two) for all plans, others rely on all sorts of price differenciators and specials and other crap and elaborate arrays of firewalls, proxies and such.

And I meant using your phone as an SSH server, having your PC use an SSH client in SOCKS mode (ssh -D port) and proxying through localhost - your phone will create the TCP connections on demand.

What someone really ought to do is a comprehensive analysis of what data plans offer -which carriers firewall, which carriers proxy (including recompression - I believe someone did a simple benchmark and noticed pages loaded faster on Verizon than AT&T, but AT&T loaded YouTube videos faster - iPhone 4), what protocols are let through and which aren't, etc.

The 3GPP based carriers will do these things (because switching phones is trivial), the CDMA carriers less so (they know what your phone can do).

Re:How do they tell?

[gorzek]

I believe Sprint's practice in this area is to simply add the tethering charge to your bill if they find out you're tethering without paying. :)

Re:How do they tell?

[yuna49]

2. Make the VPN tunnel the default route (just a routing table change).

Actually it's a bit tricker than that. You still need a route to the VPN server's public IP address via the original default gateway so that the tunnel can be maintained. After that route is established, you can switch the default route to the remote end of the tunnel.

Re:How do they tell?

[MBGMorden]

Yeah, when I'm on an untrusted network the first thing I like to do is dial into the network where I keep all my important documents and files.

Um, that's the very POINT of a VPN - a secure way of accessing a trusted network by way of an untrusted network.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wooh! Third party ROMs! I have another reason to be happy about my Cyanogen phone.

Re:How do they tell?

[Grizzley9]

Towers are not overloaded, the provider just needs to add more antennas on the tower. Using a land line while at home when you have a cell phone is ridiculous as well. What's the point of wasting an extra $20/month when you don't need it and can just use your cell phone? Less and less people have home phones anymore, just ask any telco. Wifi is not everywhere.

Also, you seem to have a lot of anger towards smartphones, the iPhone in particular. Perhaps you just need more coffee. Now I'll get off your lawn.

Re:How do they tell?

[AJH16]

Except their prices are much CHEAPER than ours. Not more expensive. They simply run their networks better and benefit from the population density. The point I was trying to make is that hairyfeet's argument that the cellular network can only support so much or that the system is unworkable in an efficient way is bullshit and Europe proves this. The US very much has it's own unique challenges as we have lower population density, but lower density should also mean that high bandwidth users have less impact as there is more space in the spectrum since users are more spread out.

Re:How do they tell?

[Grizzley9]

For iOS? Hell, you're screwed any way you turn.

Unless you are tethering your (wifi) iPad.

Re:How do they tell?

[Duradin]

I never have mod points when I want them and always have them when I'd rather comment. Go /. mod system.

Anyways, "just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should* do that" doesn't pop up here on /. much so I'm always happy to see it when it does.

For full disclosure, I've only got a flip feature phone which stays at home or in the car as wanted (why bother with crappy cell phone quality when you've got a solid landline); I carry an iPod touch for my ultra mobile media needs and for the times I don't have access to WiFi, I, get this, use the internal storage on the iPod touch. There are times it'd be nice to have a data plan and a smart phone, like getting google maps on the go if I want/need to drastically alter my route, but youtube et al seems like a rather silly use of a somewhat limited resource.

Re:How do they tell?

[treeves]

"I can find a computer just about anywhere,"

Really? You should get out more.

Re:How do they tell?

[hairyfeet]

Thanks, but I fully expected to be modded down. The "me me me now now NOW!" generation is so damned spoiled that God fucking forbid they should have to actually CONSERVE any resource! That is why you get these asses going "gas prices suck!" while driving the 8MPG SUV landboat, asses going "My service sucks!" while blowing through 3G watching porn and kitteh videos, why we have NIMBYs going "You can't build plants here...but I better be able to run my AC full blast bitch!"

Time and time again we see the tragedy of the commons, because there are simply too many self centered greedy little shits. I use my cell phone for....get this...making phone calls and making sure my elderly parents can get a hold of me if there is an emergency. I have access to a couple of different laptops if I need mobility and it isn't like Wifi isn't everywhere but most of the time when I'm out I try to actually ENJOY being outside! I know, its a concept! to actually enjoy a sunny day without having my face glued to a damned screen, you'd think I was a caveman throwing sticks by the way this generation acts!

But as I said sadly we'll see my prediction come true, because we are already seeing it now. More and more assholes with smartphones blasting the shit out of the towers, wiping out the honeybees thanks to the 3G freqs throwing off their sense of direction, but short of the government throwing a banhammer on the thing nobody will conserve shit. they will just keep on slamming, making cell service for ALL shitty with dropped calls and serious drops in quality, all because they are so damned spoiled they can't stand the thought of actually waiting for anything.

Just today as I went to get lunch for my family I saw one about 25 practically ready to explode because he had to wait a whole 10 minutes to get a fresh made BBQ sandwich. I thought "How fucking spoiled can you get?" but sadly that is our future, surrounded by "me me me now now NOW" little assholes blowing through resources and acting like it is their right to waste. How damned sad that is what we've turned into.

I'm just happy I've taught my boys to appreciate things and not to be wasteful, so much so that when I offered to take their dual core hand me downs and replace them with quads they both said "These do everything we need, no reason to waste money and time on PCs when the ones we have work fine. thanks anyway". needless to say I was damned proud of them, hence why they are having nice BBQ sandwiches for lunch.

Re:How do they tell?

[Belial6]

Just wait until he start on his rant about how bad those new fangled 'water closets' are.

Re:How do they tell?

[Rich0]

Hmm, even a little more complicated than this, since I only want VPN traffic to go to that address, not non-VPN traffic to the same IP.

Re:How do they tell?

[Belial6]

You sound just like the nutcases that said we shouldn't stream music or video over our landlines. Heck, they even whined about pictures being sent over the internet. It is always amazing how people keep repeating the same dumb ideas, even after history has shown them to be wrong.

If YOU were not part of the "me generation" that you despise so much, you wouldn't have a problem with overloaded cell phone towers.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

can't they just watch the TTL on the packets?

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fell sorry for your chidren, having such an asshole as father.

Fuck you.

Re:How do they tell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea 3.x tether is working on my phone right now... It has Froyo on it and its working fine. Thinking about setting up vpn to make sure my traffic is more secure..

Re:How do they tell?

[Bucky24]

You might be one of the lucky few who's carrier actually cares about them (the customer).

Re:How do they tell?

[Bucky24]

If you're tethering with a wifi iPad then you wouldn't be on the cell network anyway. Unless you mean the 3G iPad can act as a hotspot? I might actually look into getting one if that's true.

Re:How do they tell?

[Bucky24]

Does Easytether work well? I've seen it in the app store but have been leery of trying it out.

Re:How do they tell?

[hairyfeet]

Actually I only have a cell so that my elderly parents have a way to contact me if there is an accident or if they need my help. What's your excuse? And are you SERIOUSLY comparing the AIRWAVES to landlines? Are you high, or just don't understand physics? You can't make new freqs fall from the sky you know. Did you read the link? Of course not, it might shatter your illusion.

trying reading the link, that is if you can tear yourself away from your iJesus long enough.

Re:How do they tell?

[Belial6]

Make the excuses that you want. You are whining that other people are interfering with your cell phone use. That makes you are ridiculous hypocrite. You are also declaring that there is no way to get any more bandwidth than we currently have. That just makes you ridiculous.

Re:How do they tell?

[JWSmythe]

Really? No, not really.

Take a road trip. Fire up netstubler, vistubler, kismet, or whatever your preferred choice in wireless diagnostic tools are. You'll find that something like 25% of the APs are unencrypted. If you stop to try to use quite a few of them, you'll find that they don't work. Either they've enabled MAC filtering, or they do something simple like turn off their cable/dsl modem but leave the AP turned on. Maybe they've disabled DHCP, and set all their machines static. Or some combination of those.

There are ways to decrypt Verizon's DSL/FiOS default WEP key. They've also been deploying newer APs, and forcing upgrades on the old ones. Where I could get in 9 of 10 a year or so ago, now it's like 1 in 30.

If you're on a road trip, do you really have the time to waste (and possible felony charges)? Probably not. If you have an hour to spend on each AP until you find one that works, you could have been hundreds of miles down the road.

But there's coffee shops, hotels, or whatever, right? Well, I've found that most hotels these days are protecting their networks at least to some degree. It may be something trivial like asking for the last name of the person who reserved the room, and the room number. No problem, except it'd help to know that information.

If you're stopped in remote nowhere, and you want to get online, it's nicer to get online, than wait for the next exit. Try I-10 sometime. It's a fun drive, if you like long stretches of nothing. Or as I was warned before my first trip, "Be careful, after the first 10 to 20 hours, you'll swear you saw a coyote chasing a road runner. "

For the fun of it (and being the computer nerd that I am), I broadcast live video of 3 of my last 4 trips across I-10 on my web site. The first trip, probably close to 10 years ago, with a Nextel im1100 was interesting. It worked most of the time from Jacksonville to the Texas border. Then it was hit and miss through San Antonio. After that? Good luck. I didn't have a signal from San Antonio to El Paso.

On a more recent trip with a Verizon device (I can't remember which), I kept a signal for most of the drive. Well, there were no obvious drop outs, just very very slow frame rates. (like 4 frames a minute). All I was sending was a compressed image, and a single text string with some GPS information, which was decoded server-side.

On the first trip, people were SOL if they wanted me to do something. On the last two trips, I was able to stop at any rest area, truck stop, or whatever, and get online, regardless of how far out I was. Sure, some places have wifi. Many don't. And try asking for a Starbucks near Ft. Stockton, Tx. You may as well have been wearing a green jump suit and said "Hi, I'm from Mars. Take us to your leader."

But back to the average day to day. On some trips, where I had a second driver, I've had to get online to fix an issue. It's either spend two hours on the phone explaining to someone what to do, or spend 5 minutes tethered to the phone. It's easy to switch drivers. It's harder to hunt around for the nearest place that may have Wifi for you.

On one of my recent trips, I was stuck at an airport. Great, an airport. One of the major technical advancements of humanity! Well, when there are several thousand people in the terminal, with a stack of delayed flights, you'll find that even resolving a hostname can be troublesome. And yes, we tried calling out. We'd either get all circuits are busy, or the call would drop in the first few seconds. Too many people trying to do the same thing. The gate crew could only tell us "there was an equipment problem, and they're sending another plane." Great, so sometime in the next hour to week we'll be getting on a plane. The person traveling with me was on the airport supplied free Wifi, and spent 10 minutes

Re:How do they tell?

[hairyfeet]

Make the excuses that you want. You are whining that other people are interfering with your carbon and fossil fuel use. That makes you are ridiculous hypocrite. See how nicely that fits? Wouldn't happen to be a teabagger per chance?

Re:How do they tell?

[Yamioni]

You can't make new freqs fall from the sky you know.

Well, you kind of can. They just need to do what they did with HD radio. Improve transmission and reception technology such that you can utilize more and more precise frequencies. That's not to say that you could necessarily avoid using the frequency that is killing bees, but if you could squeeze more channels into a safer frequency range, I don't see anything stopping us from doing so in the future.

But that aside, yes, new frequencies just don't make themselves available. You have to develop technology so you can better utilize the ones that are already there.

Re:How do they tell?

[Grizzley9]

No, what I meant was tethering with your iPhone to an iPad that only has Wifi. This was big talk when the iPad came out if you'd be able to connect it to your iPhone or not. This was before ATT allowed tethering though. But since they use the roughly same browser and OS, you wouldn't be detected.

Customer No-Service

[Anonymous Coward]

My Virgin Mobile MiFi (bought under a plan no longer available) is theoretically unlimited and "only" $40/month, but has had too much downtime for my taste, and atrocious customer service.

As long as most customers who call for service are idiots who either actively create their own problems or can't be bothered to read a manual written to target a 4th-grade reading level, then this is a good thing.

People like that won't use common sense on their own. You have to provide an incentive. Remotely administered electric shocks create a lot of thorny legal problems so shitty service is a stop-gap solution.

Anyone who has ever worked a support line and dealt with the hellishness of not only rampant stupidity, but not being allowed to tell idiots that they are in fact idiots (not sure which is worse) will understand. The rest of you, if you haven't been there, you might feel quick to condemn me but you really don't know what you're talking about. Not that that ever stops anyone, of course, because you know everything don't you?

Re:Customer No-Service

[redherring728]

Not that I doubt that there must be plenty of extraordinarily frustrating people calling those lines (I know, there are a lot of idiots out there, I'm a math tutor), and I have no doubt that I would want to bang my head against the wall for that very reason if I had that job, but your criticism seems to be completely out of place and presumptive.

I'm not really even sure what you think "is a good thing." Is it the "atrocious" customer service? It's the only thing relevant to your post that you quoted. No matter how stupid the people calling in are or how many of them are calling in, that's not good. I can't even begin to wonder why you think that is. Atrocious customer service is atrocious for all customers, not just idiots.

Not to mention, it would also be idiotic to assume that there aren't idiots on both sides of the phone line.

And don't try to wave off criticism by saying "You don't know what you're talking about." That's called ad-hominem.

Finally, I have to point out that what you wrote is completely off-topic; taking a minor point (a grand total of three words out of the summary) and making it out to be a major point.

Re:Customer No-Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, I have to point out that what you wrote is completely off-topic; taking a minor point (a grand total of three words out of the summary) and making it out to be a major point.

Did you forget? this *is* ./ ... WHAT do you expect???

Sprint

[twilightzero]

My HTC Evo comes with a wi-fi hotspot app built in that allows I believe 4 clients. It may not be the fastest but it works.

Re:Sprint

[XanC]

Does that work without the $30/month account extra? Since it can be turned on and off without re-upping the contract, and it's billed on a daily basis, I do find it useful on the odd occasion I know I'm going to need it.

Re:Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay for their tethering plan and Sprint on EVO rocks. It is my only internet. When I lived in NYC and had 4G it was totally awesome. Now in Indy, not to awesome but I can still stream movies.

Re:Sprint

[Yosho]

The app that Sprint bundles with their phones does require the $30/month extra. However, if you root your phone, you can install a third-party application (such as Wireless Tether) and use it without paying the fee. As far as I can tell, Sprint doesn't cap bandwidth and does not block devices; just last weekend I tethered a tablet to my Evo Shift 4G and was using it constantly.

Re:Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar experience here. I have an EVO 4G modded with Cyanogenmod 7 and i can turn my phone into a hotspot. Wireless is pretty fast. Tethering is very simple. Unlimited data. I use the 4G occasionally and if it's in a good area the speed is pretty decent. Makes my amazon/google music storage much more useful. I always hear people bash sprint but honestly I've had a great experience with them since i left verizon.. and i can almost sit down without pain now. (FUVerizon!)

Re:Sprint

[maxume]

Virgin Mobile is a Sprint owned company in the U.S., it was a joint venture but Sprint bought Virgin out and purchased rights to use the brand.

Virgin phones only talk to Sprint owned towers, no Verizon towers, so the coverage isn't as good.

Re:Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

On Android, you don't even need to root your device to tether it. There are utilities that do require a utility on your PC, and ADB access, or do their magic over Bluetooth.

The advantage of using a utility like this is that you do not have a wireless attack surface someone can potentially hack.

Re:Sprint

[shutdown -p now]

Stock Android has USB tethering out of the box since, IIRC, 2.2.

Re:Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

Root + Cyanogen or android-wifi-tether is free, 4G is pretty fast... 10meg max, around 5meg average in the areas I've been to. It's true that it's $30 a month for the tethering if you want to be legit but it does in fact work just fine if you're rooted and not paying. I've had 16GB months and average about 4GB and have not heard a peep from Sprint. Also, I'm on the Everything plan and am enjoying the only remaining (non-grandfathered) truly unlimited data plan left in the country.

Re:Sprint

[mlts]

It does, but cellular carriers have the ability to disable it. I know that by default, Verizon devices won't show up the option for tethering (wireless or USB) unless you have the option on your phone.

Of course, that is easily gotten around with a custom ROM, or root.

Re:Sprint

[Calos]

...but you'll rarely see stock Android on your phone. To install a version that the tethering hasn't been cut out of by the carrier or manufacturer, you still need root.

Re:Sprint

[hedwards]

Depends where you live. I never had reception problems before I left Sprint.

Re:Sprint

[Totenglocke]

Quite true. I had a rooted Evo 4G for a year and tether on my Evo 3D all the time with no consequences.

Re:Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I hate to post as AC but I do not have an account but am a long time reader! ;)

I own one of those Virgin Mobile phones on the cheapest prepaid plan, which gets you 300 talk minutes and unlimited text/data (I don't talk on the phone much..). My phone is the Virgin Mobile branded Samsung Intercept (this one). I've had it since last December.

I do not have access to broadband at my home...no cable, no DSL, no wireless, no nothing. So when I found out I could tether with the phone and use my 3G connection as a alternative to my 14k dial-up I was very, very interested! ;) I got instructions and rooted the phone ASAP and installed barnacle wifi tether, which got me ad-hoc mode and worked just fine with my PC.

The speeds vary a lot of course but generally:

- At night I've gotten speeds up in the 200-300kB/s downstream and 50kBs upstrem. I'm not saying this is sustained speeds or anything, but you can constantly hit these speeds in bursts.

Any other time it just depends on the time of day. You can tell when a lot of other people are using the network. Sometimes it drops out and won't come back for several minutes, sometimes I have to put my phone in airplane mode for a few seconds to get it to reconnect to the network before it'll work again. Hell, sometimes I have to pull the damn battery.

But it works, and for $25 a month I have unlimited access to the 'net at a decent speed. I got rid of the land line, I'm paying way less for an internet connection now than I was before.

Since I first rooted the phone I learned about custom ROMs and what-not so I've done several things that I'd rather not go into in detail to this phone. I'll just say that the intercept is a decent phone for someone that wants a phone and not a portable gaming device. It won't do netflix either, so if that's important to you buy a better android device! This phone is rather sluggish, even with the latest official update from virgin mobile (2.2). Once you root it and tinker with it a bit it becomes a rather nice device though...but again, its a low end Android phone for sure!

I'm ashamed to say what I paid for mine! ;)

Anyway, I figured I should post this since I've been using Virgin Mobile via android phone as my primary ISP for several months now. Also, I eventually figured out that I could tether without having to be in ad-hoc mode, so it works with all my wifi devices now (like my Wii!). The ping times on the online games I play ain't too bad...in the 200ms range...better than dial up. ;)

Good day all, love this site. :)

Re:Sprint

[shutdown -p now]

They can only disable it on the phones they sell, and that is done by modding as well. There is no remote killswitch or anything like that in vanilla android.

Re:Sprint

[LVSlushdat]

VirginMobile's $25/mo plan is great!! best I've seen.. It's going up next month to $35/mo for new signups, but I understand that if you are on the plan now, you will continue with $25/mo. It's 300 "anytime" minutes. amd "unlimited" data/text. I make very few voice calls, so the 300 minutes is just fine, but since I do website design/support, I'd gotten VERY tired of having a customer call wanting me to do *something* on their website, and then needing to find a McDonalds or Starbucks to get on via wifi on the laptop. My only nit is the phone I'm using.. a Samsung Intercept.. slower than molasses in February.. I WANT one of those Google Nexus S.. They have a Sprint model, I wonder if it can work on VM.. Anybody know?? I absolutely positively WILL NOT do cellphone contracts. They are the spawn of satan...

Re:Sprint

[shutdown -p now]

Only carriers cut it out, I haven't seen manufacturers do it even on heavily modded phones (e.g. my SGS2 has it in Samsung software). So just don't buy from carriers.

Re:Sprint

[madhatter256]

My GF has a Virgin Mobile Samsung Intercept. It's a 3G phone and I own a Verizon HTC Eris (rooted with Android 2.2) and difference is astounding. For example, the quality of videos on youtube are much better on my phone than hers (they appear grainy on hers) and loading time takes a long time (coverage is a few bars for her while I get full bars at home). Sometimes her facebook doesn't show up... So yes, the coverage is not as good as Verizon. It all depends on where you live.

The problems my GF has had in the past is texting/calls not going through and not being received due to network outages... so in an emergency situation this is not a very good thing at all.... This has happened twice this year, so far.

Another major difference is the pay. I pay $80/month for my Verizon service including 500txt messages, 350minutes and unlimited data (grandfathered in - for now). Whereas, she only pays $25/month for unlimited data/texting & 250minutes. Texting is what she uses the most and so do I, but I have to watch how much I text and have gone over my limit a few times. But I get much better reception than hers and have yet to experience a network outage, dropped calls, etc.

I also have tethered my phone, but with a program I paid (before I rooted my phone), which is PDANet and have torrented off of it for a few days. Did about 10gigs of data upload alone in a few days but this was back before data caps were implemented and well before this article on slashdot appeared.

Re:Sprint

[TheNinjaroach]

As for price, though, the smaller/contractless providers like Virgin Mobile may be your best bet. I've heard they're far cheaper than any of the "big three" and make good on their "unlimited" promises. Even so, I can't vouch for their quality, having never used one myself.

FYI, Virgin Mobile uses the Sprint network.. in the US anyways. I have an Optimus V and can't tell any difference from the Sprint service that I left after 10 years. $80+ a month is simply too much money for a phone.

Re:Sprint

[TheNinjaroach]

Virgin phones only talk to Sprint owned towers, no Verizon towers, so the coverage isn't as good.

Perhaps you missed this part of his post?

Re:Sprint

[TheNinjaroach]

I can wifi tether my Optimus V without root on Virgin Mobile. There's some widget I got for free from the market that simply toggles the underlying OS support for it. I guess they didn't block those bits out on the V.M. firmware.

Re:Sprint

[Cheeko]

OR, just buy an unlocked phone. I've had ZERO issues using Tethering since March '10 on my N1 and more recently on my Nexus S on ATT.

I wonder if ATT/Verizon are purely targeting jailbroken phones or will unlocked phones fall under this as well.

Re:Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

I do the same and use ~6 GB of traffic a month with no capping or reduction in speed. Gotta love Sprint!

Re:Sprint

[evil_aaronm]

The "texts not going through" isn't limited to Virgin: AT&T sucks balls at that, too. Caused a blow-up between the wife and the daughter-in-law, once. Not pretty... Since then, if it's that important, we follow up with a phone call, just in case.

Re:Sprint

[lothos]

The $25/month plan that your girlfriend is on includes 300 minutes, not 250.

They also increased prices on July 20th, and while your girlfriend gets her old rates, new customers are paying $35/month for her plan.

Re:Sprint

[Bucky24]

Goes to show, you get what you pay for.

Re:Sprint

[maxume]

I'm curious as to your choice of phrasing. I mean, if I'm talking about towers, I probably realize that different areas have different coverage.

Re:Sprint

[Coren22]

Please tell me, how does one buy a phone that works on Verizon and not buy it from them (or a reseller)? There are no phones for Verizon on the general market. We aren't talking GSM here, it is 1XRT/EVDO (CDMA).

Re:Sprint

[Coren22]

If you haven't noticed yet. This used to be true of AT&T and Verizon, until recently. AT&T started going after the rooted tetherers, now Verizon is following suit. How long do you think before Sprint follows? This happened with Unlimited data as well, AT&T stopped offering it, then Verizon followed. Essentially by saying tethering works on rooted Android, you are admitting to stealing service from Sprint, as they charge extra for the feature (just like AT&T and Verizon).

Re:Sprint

[shutdown -p now]

Ah yes, the eternal curse of North American mobile market - I still keep forgetting about this "advantage" that Sprint/Verizon have, despite living here for almost a year now.

Anyway, I would personally never even consider a mobile operator that also has a monopoly on phones that work on their network. AT&T is crap for many reasons, but at least I can buy my unlocked phones in Europe and use them on their network.

Terms of Service

[Anonymous Coward]

N'uff said

Re:Terms of Service

[Anonymous Coward]

yawn.. fuck 'em.. you TOS appeaser corp-rats are no better than the pro-government wannabe-tyrants who think the government can dictate reality with law.

Re:Terms of Service

[IndustrialComplex]

Honestly, terms of service for almost anything now have reached such absurd levels in how lopsided they are that I just ignore the damned things now for anything I'm not using for business or negotiating for someone else. For personal use?

I got an email the other day from EA regarding them rolling over some account I registered years ago to Origin, and in their email was legalese describing how me not explicitly cancelling this new service was the same as me accepting the terms. Added onto that was their statement that they may "Alter the terms at any point, etc."

Now, for services provided to me which I am not paying for directly (I am paying for it by licensing my personal information though), I don't mind the ability for people to change terms to services they run on their servers, but it's slowly becoming that a lot of my purchased products have hooks in them which tie them back to the online service and their insane terms.

But I'm at the point where I just don't care. I'll open up a new email address and restart the service as long as they aren't revoking any of my ability to use purchased items. Now, once they start on that angle (and I'm sure they will eventually). It simply becomes a tradeoff analysis for me.

And we are back to the point where we decided that courts were a pretty good thing.

Pilgrim Jim and Bob get into a fist fight over rights of way for their sheep grazing. So society setup a system where we could sue each other instead of resorting to physical violence. What do you think is going to happen once one side effectively prohibits the other from seeking a redress in the legal system?

The big 3 in Canada

[zoffdino]

All of the big 3 in Canada allow tethering. I started with Rogers in 2008 not blocking jailbroken tethering. When Bell and Telus got the iPhone, they also allowed it. However, prices have gone up quite a bit, from $30 / 6GB to $30 / 1GB (3 times increase???) in three years. The good thing is, they usually let you keep your old plan even if you no longer qualify as student, or not part of a family pack, etc.

Re:The big 3 in Canada

[green1]

Not only does TELUS allow tethering, they actively encourage it. When they updated my Motorola milestone to froyo they bundled a tethering app that was not previously there. Additionally they are selling wifi only tablets and bragging that you don't need a separate data plan, you can simply use tethering. (according to the website "Share one data plan between your smartphone and tablet at no extra cost. It's easy, affordable, worry-free and secure." (bold text in original))

Now as for the plans themselves... these need major work, the biggest plan you can buy from TELUS is 5gig. They simply don't sell a bigger plan than that. I find this rather abysmally low.

Re:The big 3 in Canada

[WoTG]

When I was renewing my contract earlier this year, and doing research on this stuff, Rogers and Fido do NOT allow tethering on the lower end data plans. You must subscribe to the 1GB or higher plans to get tethering.

So I took my iPhone 4 SIM out

[hsmith]

and put it in my Nexus S to tether - so I guess it isn't a jailbroken device, right?

Re:So I took my iPhone 4 SIM out

[Vegeta99]

You didn't do that on a Verizon phone.

Re:So I took my iPhone 4 SIM out

[rvw]

and put it in my Nexus S to tether - so I guess it isn't a jailbroken device, right?

You didn't do that on a Verizon phone.

Why would anyone buy a Nexus S phone from a phone carrier? That would be plain stupid, as the one big advantage of having a Nexus phone (getting the latest updates from Google) is gone when a phone carrier like Verizon puts its own tweaked version of Android on the phone.

Re:So I took my iPhone 4 SIM out

[MimeticLie]

He's not saying that it's a Nexus S from Verizon (the Nexus S isn't available from Verizon, incidentally), he's pointing out that Verizon phones don't have SIM cards.

Re:So I took my iPhone 4 SIM out

[afex]

i have a nexus S from a carrier - grabbed it, ROM'd it (back to vanilla), saved a few hundred bucks. I can understand not wanting to get sucked into a 2yr agreement, but this is something i personally have no problem with since i'll be with them for 2 yrs anyhow.

"not right for everyone" - maybe
"plain stupid" - take it easy, man.

Re:So I took my iPhone 4 SIM out

[Bucky24]

"Why would anyone buy a Nexus S phone from a phone carrier?"

So it doesn't cost $600. The phone carriers give deep discounts on phones in exchange for new contracts. This is how the majority of people are able to afford smartphones at all.

Re:So I took my iPhone 4 SIM out

[Coren22]

And, when you buy the phone without the plan, only T-mobile lowers your monthly fee. AT&T and Verizon give you a $200 discount, but no difference in the cost of plans.

they can't

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not possible from them to be able to tell, unless they start forcing everyone to go through proxy but there less problems to.

Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

I know lots of people don't like sprint but they have unlimited data and you can tether all you want. Kinda makes that cloud drive you have more useful when you're not getting raped by your provider for data. I left verizon for sprint and don't regret it at all.

Sprint

[timothyb89]

Their speeds aren't the best, but they don't restrict usage at all. I can tether my (rooted) 4G android phone for free with no data caps or throttling (as far as I can tell), and on occasion I've used nearly ten gigs over a WiMAX connection while on vacation without any issue. I've rarely needed customer service as downtime and issues in general are virtually nonexistent, but it's there when needed and is pretty good.

As for price, though, the smaller/contractless providers like Virgin Mobile may be your best bet. I've heard they're far cheaper than any of the "big three" and make good on their "unlimited" promises. Even so, I can't vouch for their quality, having never used one myself.

t mobile

[hierophanta]

i like t mobile's plan scheme, where the first 2gig is at full speed and then your speed gets knocked down. instead of paying an arm and a leg for the data. their data plans are $10 a month and i've always been able to tether for free using the phone off the shelf. i hate to say it, but with their shitty service and all but they've got the best setup. all told i think that is a $20-50 per month saving

Re:t mobile

[scottbomb]

That's what sold me on T-Mobile. It will be interesting (likely a very sad day) to see how that changes when AT&T takes over.

Re:t mobile

[kybred]

i like t mobile's plan scheme, where the first 2gig is at full speed and then your speed gets knocked down. instead of paying an arm and a leg for the data. their data plans are $10 a month and i've always been able to tether for free using the phone off the shelf. i hate to say it, but with their shitty service and all but they've got the best setup. all told i think that is a $20-50 per month saving

I've got T-mo as well. My (un-rooted) Vibrant came with a option in the settings to enable it to be a WiFi AP. When I bought the phone I was told that I could tether with no extra charges. Then a couple of months after I got it, this came out:

T-Mobile recently announced the upcoming availability of a Tethering and Wi-Fi Sharing service plan that enables select smartphones to function as wireless modems for connecting devices, such as laptops, tablets and netbooks, to the Internet through the T-Mobile network.

I've only used it a couple of time, for my iPad, and so far they haven't modified my plan. But from the wording, it looks like they could. I suppose they'll only go after the biggest data hogs.

Re:t mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

2nd that. Been tethering on my G2 since I got it last year. And their "4G" is fast as hell, faster than airport wifi.

Telstra

[batkiwi]

Telstra offers quite reliable 3G service, and for $30 on prepaid you get about 400 minutes (depending on call lengths) plus 400 megs, $40 gets you ~1000 minutes and 800 megs, or $60 gets you 2000 minutes and 3GB.

No restrictions on device, tether all you want.

Re:Telstra

[AHuxley]

Sure recall http://apcmag.com/telstra-to-block-ipad-micro-sims-in-other-devices.htm
It was fun deal when the new devices entered the Australian market and they wanted in on the buzz.
You can use any device you want until x00 megs.
In Australia its a per meg limit. In the US its a rent the $x1000 dongle with some 'free'* downloads.

Re:Telstra

[hedwards]

Telestra isn't an option. Do they even provide service in the US? Around here we've got precisely 4 choices.

Re:Telstra

[Anonymous Coward]

Telestra isn't an option. Do they even provide service in the US? Around here we've got precisely 4 choices.

A good portion of the rural areas in the US only have two options: Verizon and AT&T.

Re:Telstra

[Bucky24]

Where I used to live AT&T didn't even have coverage. We had Verizon or nothing.

With what staff do they intend to do this?

[waddgodd]

In MA, the IBEW and CWA declared a strike against Verizon starting yesterday (Sunday). So, Verizon has very little trained staff on right now, and they want to do things to make their phones seem like they're broken to the end-user. This will turn out well....

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wireless group is not involved. Its in every news story.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

In MA, the IBEW and CWA declared a strike against Verizon starting yesterday (Sunday). So, Verizon has very little trained staff on right now, and they want to do things to make their phones seem like they're broken to the end-user. This will turn out well....

I have this idea that union members are never the brains behind any operation.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Antisyzygy]

Uhh, no. Verizon wants to do this to double dip into your wallet. They are greedy, and have no government oversight. Government oversight occurred on landlines to prevent things like this, and now for some reason Congress sees a major difference between the way land lines should be regulated, and the way wireless lines should be regulated even though they both are pretty much the same thing and serve similar purposes. Its all a big crock to make as few of people as much money as possible.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon is on strike not Verizon Wireless. They are two separate companies.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon != Verizon Wireless....

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The strike is pointless. The result either will be Verizon shutting down that facility and outsourcing immediately, firing all the strikers (which is easily done), or at worse, giving in their demands, and in 1-2 years, replacing the call center with one in India, and the skilled labor with H-1Bs. You know those want ads in the paper asking for 11 years of experience with Word 2010 or 5 years of experience with Cisco Nexus hardware? Those are not just yuks. Those are so the hiring firm can get the H-1B person they want without stooping to hire someone domestic.

Most likely the result we will see is a bunch of IBEW members looking for work in a couple weeks.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon Wireless is not a Union shop. It is a separate subsidiary partly owned by Verizon and Vodafone.

Verizon Wireline is a Union shop that is on strike right now.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the problem is slightly more complicated. The telcos aren't ready to deploy wireless internet becuase they were/are wasteful, and now they have an infrastructure unable to bear the load of a fleet of internet loving teenagers. Imagine a group of people who were already drowning the pipes with youtube data discovering they can fileshare music and movies on the go at all times, no problem. The telcos don't want to outright say they can't handle this, so they'll just keep cranking prices up and up to reduce demand, or to comfortably replace high load towers while still making comfortable profit.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon doesn't support cellular phones. Verizon Wireless does, however.

Re:With what staff do they intend to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

er ... why was this modded as a troll?

What about the new FCC law the says any app and an

[Joe_Dragon]

What about the new FCC law the says any app and any network?

Re:What about the new FCC law the says any app and

[Anonymous Psychopath]

What about the new FCC law the says any app and any network?

That policy does not say what free tethering proponents think it says.

In the UK...

[webmistressrachel]

In the UK, there's one big 3G-only network offering unlimited data for £15 a month on PAYG.

Grab a Sony-Ericsson A2 handset supporting HSPDA, stick your SIM in there, and tether with the oldest version of the PC-suite you can find (they get worse and more unreliable the newer they get).

I HAMMER that fucker, and have done since the plan came out, and not a single complaint and never throttled - we're talking gigs a day over Bittorrent / eMule. Customer support told me they don't want to know what I'm doing, they don't support it, but they don't stop it.

Anybody with the brains to figure out which network I'm referring to, feel free, but if it hits critical mass I feel it will come to an end. And all because I posted on /. - I was in two minds whether or not to. Please do not post the network's name in replies to this post. I like it this way.

Re:In the UK...

[obarthelemy]

this is what makes throttling and metering necessary: since everybody doing that would take the networks down, nobody (in the name of fairness) can be allowed to do it.

Re:In the UK...

[webmistressrachel]

During the same support call, the rep told me that the network would prioritise voice, text and pay per gig traffic. I was quite relieved, not only because of the guilt aspect (tragedy of the commons) but also because I know that my torrent is not hurting their profit margins. They seen fairly impressed that I had asked, and told me not to worry, enjoy it!

Sprint

[Anonymous Coward]

My first generation Pre is still chuggin' along, with super easily installed homebrew on the still awesome WebOS (this homebrew includes a great free tethering app). I've used my data plan as my only internet connection several times, even for online games or (reasonable) downloading.

Maybe Not

[ducttapekz]

1. After clicking through a few links I found the original story:

http://www.mobiledia.com/news/101731.html

2. Mine still works. The only source I found is some guy who says he got the landing page you get when you use Verizon's app. Anyone actually get this warning using any of the non Verizon apps?

Re:Maybe Not

[Galactic Dominator]

I found particularly interesting the phrase "illegal data tetherers". Something doesn't smell right here.

Re:Maybe Not

[KClaisse]

Just got back from a very long vacation across the US and racked up almost 20GB worth of data usage through tethered laptops/devices. I used a combination of physical tether apps like EasyTether and WiFi hotspot creators like Barnacle WiFi Tether. I never hit any such wall saying I was required to buy a tethering plan. I am on a rooted and flashed Droid 2 Global on Verizon with a Grandfathered Unlimited data plan. I was getting full speeds (depending of course on signal quality). There was no disconnection, throttling, or warnings about tethering whatsoever. I am still tethered on my laptop here at home too without problems. I suspect this is with the official app, like you say. Other apps work just fine as of now and I dont really see how they could crack down on it in the future. Android phones can generate almost any type of traffic that a similar linux or windows PC can. And even if they were performing deep packet inspection to test for PC-only data, a simple VPN would completely nullify their searches. I dont see this being enforceable at all for any of the tech-savvy people out there.

This should drive them out of business

[Anonymous Coward]

If consumers weren't so stupid, this should drive companies like this out of business. I am not sure why Verizon and other mobile providers charge X number of bucks a month for unlimited data, then smack you with additional fees for tethering. Either that, or they charge for tiered data plans. Data usage is data usage.

So sad

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone makes an awesome (wired/wireless) router. It gets hot and the battery runs out, but it's really fast!
In the US you have hot spots all over the place, we don't have that in Australia. So the convenience of reaching into your pocket and pressing some buttons and then having a super fast internet connection for a couple of people is awesome!

You can even put the iPhone back in your pocket. When it's cold it helps to keep your nuts warm too.

Sprint

[zogre]

I have Sprint, they've never given me a problem about tethering. As far as I can tell, there's no data cap on my unlimited plan (2 Epic 4G phones, $150 /mo unlimited everything family with the 4G premium, both phones are rooted and running Froyo 2.6.32.9).

My wife is a heavy media consumer with Pandora and Netflix. Occasionally my AT&T home internet goes out, and I stay online for work and play by using Wired Tether (http://android-wired-tether.googlecode.com/) because my desktop doesn't have 802.11. I frequently use the Wireless Tether (http://android-wifi-tether.googlecode.com/) when I'm out and about with my laptop, as my "4G" (San Francisco bay area) is generally faster than free WiFi and I don't have to deal with a gateway.

All told, it's rare for us to be under 4 gigs per month, and I haven't received any communication from Sprint other than the occasional text advertisement and our monthly statement, but YMMV.

Re:What about the new FCC law the says any app and

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to argue against free tethering when Gingerbread includes it in the base operating system. I'm reminded of home ISPs and their very brief war against routers.

Remember, it's a cell phone company

[JoeCommodore]

Sky High Promises
High Rates
Bad Service
Lousy Support
and the power to get away with it.

Nothing new there, even before smartphones the complaints were the same.

Whats the difference how you use the data???

[Cutting_Crew]

What difference does it make whether you natively use the phone to get on the net or use another device to connect to the phone to get on the net? the same source of data is still the phone regardless.

Re:Whats the difference how you use the data???

[tooyoung]

What difference does it make whether you natively use the phone to get on the net or use another device to connect to the phone to get on the net? the same source of data is still the phone regardless.

You are aware they charge for text messaging...

Re:Whats the difference how you use the data???

[artor3]

Desktops are more convenient to use, and so people end up using much more data on them. If all you use the tether for is browsing, then they shouldn't care. But if you're streaming an entire TV season on Netflix and downloading games on Steam, you're going to use up a lot of bandwidth. They want to dissuade people from doing that.

The good way to do it would be with a flat price per GB, with a discount during off-peak hours. But they can make more money with the current tiered service plans, so that's what they'll do until and unless they are forced to stop through either competition (unlikely since other carriers can also make more money with the same tactics) or a law (unlikely since the Republicans are slaves to big business and the Democrats are spineless cowards who'll abandon their "principles" at the first sign of a fight).

Re:Whats the difference how you use the data???

[Cutting_Crew]

They want to dissuade people from doing that.

thats none of their business. If we have 2 GB of data allowed then how we get that data shouldn't matter. As someone else said, if we watch netflix the faster we get to the limit and the chance of paying overage fees are feasible. Don't understand why they wouldnt want to go that route.

link is dead and no other sources can be found

[postmortem]

Does anybody have another credible source?

Re:link is dead and no other sources can be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this (In other words, link is not broken)

Why should they care?

[webdog314]

I suppose it makes their lousy network actually look as bad as it really is, but why else should they care? Didn't they do away with unlimited plans? If you're paying for the data, why should they give a damn how you are actually using it... unless of course, they CAN'T actually supply the data and bandwidth they are advertising. It's like selling lollipops but saying that you can't give one to your friend. If you run out of lollipops and want to buy more, ISN'T THAT THE WHOLE POINT??

Re:Why should they care?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose it makes their lousy network actually look as bad as it really is, but why else should they care? Didn't they do away with unlimited plans? If you're paying for the data, why should they give a damn how you are actually using it... unless of course, they CAN'T actually supply the data and bandwidth they are advertising. It's like selling lollipops but saying that you can't give one to your friend. If you run out of lollipops and want to buy more, ISN'T THAT THE WHOLE POINT??

Most people are still grandfathered in on the unlimited data plans/

We use Cyanogen in my family

[Anonymous Coward]

We also use Firefox with a default Android useragent while browsing tethered through Cyanogenmod on our phones.

....'cause fuck Verizon, that's why. I wanted a Nexus S with actual service.

Still works for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted this using MyWi 4.0 tethering.

Re:What about the new FCC law the says any app and

[mykos]

I think the default stance of telecoms is "Oh yeah? Sue me."

This is why unlimited data plans are stupid

[tolomea]

Nothing is ever really unlimited, they are just making assumptions about your potential usage based on device. If just you paid for the data you used they wouldn't give a damn what you were using it for and would actively encourage things like tethering as a way of encouraging you to use more data.

Re:This is why unlimited data plans are stupid

[sjames]

The thing is, they're not even confining their fraud to "unlimited" any more. Now they're offering metered plans and calling you a hog if you dare to use what they sold you.

It's like McDonald's wanting to charge you an extra bathroom surcharge if you dare to actually drink all of your stupid sized soda.

Re:This is why unlimited data plans are stupid

[Bucky24]

Sounds to me more like they're trying to charge for you letting your friend drink out of the same straw.

jailbreak tether? pay for it? root?

[bhcompy]

My WinMo6.1 phone does it out of the box. It's built into the OS

Re:jailbreak tether? pay for it? root?

[mjwx]

My WinMo6.1 phone does it out of the box. It's built into the OS

So do most Android phones. The tethering API has been included since 2.2 and HTC Sense has had it built in since 2.1.

If you're getting bent over by your phone company it's not your handsets fault (unless your handset was built for that purpose, which makes them an accessory).

Re:jailbreak tether? pay for it? root?

[artor3]

Androids do tethering out of the box too. But some carriers charge extra for tethered data. By rooting the phone, you can hide the fact that you're using it as a tether and thereby avoid the extra charges. That's what Verizon is cracking down on.

Re:jailbreak tether? pay for it? root?

[hedwards]

Indeed, and the question is why it is that they're allowed to charge customers more depending upon what it is that they choose to do with the bandwidth. It's one thing to charge more for business accounts that need to be up constantly, but to charge more for the same service is just plain wrong.

Re:jailbreak tether? pay for it? root?

[LVSlushdat]

Indeed, and the question is why it is that they're allowed to charge customers more depending upon what it is that they choose to do with the bandwidth. It's one thing to charge more for business accounts that need to be up constantly, but to charge more for the same service is just plain wrong.

Silly you.... Don't you know that Verizon/AT&T and their ilk OWN the Congress/WH/SCOTUS ie: The WHOLE US Government... I can't imagine how you
could think otherwise...

Whatever

[xq311z]

Just used barnacle to view this story!

Pick one or the other

[Solandri]

Either you get rid of unlimited accounts and charge by the GB, in which case it shouldn't matter to you whether those GBs are from the phone or tethered. Or you restrict tethering because people on unlimited accounts are using too much bandwidth while tethered. Charging for tethering while at the same time charging per GB is trying to have your cake and eat it too.

The FTC should step in and make it illegal to advertise bandwidth as "x GB" if the carrier puts restrictions on exactly what is and isn't allowed in those GB. At the very least it should come with an asterisk and a disclosure of limitations at the bottom of the ad. That way people know not to compare GB* to GB.

Re:Pick one or the other

[Paradyme]

Either you get rid of unlimited accounts and charge by the GB, in which case it shouldn't matter to you whether those GBs are from the phone or tethered. Or you restrict tethering because people on unlimited accounts are using too much bandwidth while tethered. Charging for tethering while at the same time charging per GB is trying to have your cake and eat it too. The FTC should step in and make it illegal to advertise bandwidth as "x GB" if the carrier puts restrictions on exactly what is and isn't allowed in those GB. At the very least it should come with an asterisk and a disclosure of limitations at the bottom of the ad. That way people know not to compare GB* to GB.

Good luck trying to impose that. I might be shooting my karma, but what the phone companies are doing is not illegal, and it isn't unexpected. Just like a private person has the right to decide whether you agree to the terms set by contract, the company has right to decide whether to sell you the contract or not. If you do not agree and think this style of contract is making them lose huge amounts of business... Go ahead and start your own telecom company.

Re:Pick one or the other

[webdog314]

Actually, it might be more apt to say they want to have their cake... and my cake... and eat them both.

Re:Pick one or the other

[TooMuchToDo]

The FCC regulates the airwaves, which is effectively the same as a right of way. Just as your local municipality can force whatever rules on Comcast/Cox/TimeWarner/*incumbent cable provider* for the right of way rights, the FCC can enforce regulations on organizations using a public resource.

Re:Pick one or the other

[Anonymous Coward]

because people on unlimited accounts are using too much bandwidth

By definition anybody on this plan is not using too much bandwidth. It's unlimited.

Re:Pick one or the other

[LWATCDR]

Umm... They have gotten rid of unlimited. They now throttle you if you are a "data hog" on the grandfathered unlimited and new users can't get unlimited at all.
So now they limit and charge for tethering.

Re:Pick one or the other

[Anonymous Coward]

And trying to get you to pay for additional cakes (which they want to have and eat too).

Re:Pick one or the other

[Rich0]

I think it is the cable company mentality. Back in the 80s cable companies were all upset that some of their consumers would buy one cable box, and then split the coax to their TV and run it to a second TV. This of course was a serious inconvenience since you'd have to change rooms to change channels, but cable company executives probably spent a small fortune in meeting time trying to figure out ways to prevent it. I'm surprised they didn't lobby for the right to inspect homes at random, and the contracts invariably would say one TV per tuner box. In the end the behavior is very hard to police.

Cable companies had the same concerns about people being able to hook up more than one computer to a router. This actually is detectable most of the time right now, and they had a general resentment of not being able to charge for every computer, iPod, Tivo, and whatever else might be on that network. They never did end up policing this since it would have invariably led to consumer backlash.

Look at DRM where the goal is to get you to keep buying the same content over and over, eliminate libraries, and get rid of people loaning stuff to friends.

This is just another example of the corporate entitlement mentality. Why innovate and sell a new or better product when you can instead try to force people (through oligopoly power) to keep buying the same product over and over?

Re:Pick one or the other

[Rich0]

Yup, even T-Mobile has new "unlimited" plans that throttle at some level. The only difference between those plans and the grandfathered ones is that the new ones tell you what the threshold is. They always throttled you to 2G if you used too much bandwidth...

Re:Pick one or the other

[Bucky24]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but don't cell phone companies pay quite a bit to use the airwaves? If not, then I agree with you.

And how does Comcast use airwaves? They're a cable company. Cable. As in, underground. Last I checked that wasn't an airwave.

Re:Pick one or the other

[TooMuchToDo]

Airwaves, physical in-the-ground right-of-ways, doesn't matter. Both are shared, public resources we grant organizations the privilege of using (either for monetary or in-kind compensation). It doesn't matter if you have to pay for them or not. Paying for something doesn't mean there aren't strings attached.

Doesn't Verizon have to allow open access to any device on the 700mhz frequency band they purchased the right to use due to rules Google asked the FCC to stipulate?

http://www.google.com/search?q=verizon+google+700mhz

Is this just an iPhone thing?

[AgentBurbank]

They use the term "jailbreak" and the Forbes article refers to an app named MyWi that is available via Cydia. This terminology leads me to believe they are specifically targeting jailbroken iPhone tethering. Android phones like the Droid X and X2 tether "out of the box" (unrooted) with apps from Google's marketplace. No jailbreaking/rooting/evil hax0ring required.

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

No "ebil hax0ring" required on the iphone either, you just pay a bit extra, and voila, tethering! service is good, never noticed any down time (for the price this is the what you'd expect...)

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[digitallife]

The iPhone, like most modern phones, can tether "out of the box" just fine. It's the phone companies that stop it. In fact the iPhone hotspots out of the box, which is a hell of a lot better than tethering. People who have not used an iPhone for any extended period of time should be banned from speaking about them.

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[AgentBurbank]

People who have not used an iPhone for any extended period of time should be banned from speaking about them.

Not trying to start a fanboy war. My curiosity stems solely from my observation of the use of very iPhone-centric terms in TFA and the linked articles within it. To rephrase in more politically correct terms, "Is this crack down across the board or is it going to focus more on just iOS or just Android?"

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

This "hotspotting" that you speak of is commonly referred to as wireless tethering - a feature all of these phones discussed provide. People who have not used an Android phone for any extended period of time should be banned from speaking about them.

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[rmorenc]

As someone else also posted, iPhone can support tethering out of the box as well, provided you have the correct data plan from your carrier. Back when the iPhone 4 was released, I was grandfathered in to the unlimited plan on it. When I called to try to activate tethering (since the contract language at the time was somewhat murky as to if you could officially tether with the unlimited plan) I was told by the customer service rep that I would need to upgrade to the "better" data plan. "Better" obviously meant better for AT&T since I would be losing unlimited in favor of a 2GB cap. The CSR had no concrete answer as to how the new plan actually was better for me except it was $5 cheaper, although he tried to make it sound as if I was losing out on other non-tethering features by having the unlimited plan. He even went so far as to try to tell me that my current data plan was "incompatible with tethering due to technical limitations of the unlimited data plan" and that the 2GB plan "overcomes technical limitations on the 3G network to allow tethering." Right. He obviously could not explain exactly what those "technical limitations of the 3G network" were that disallowed tethering on one billed plan in favor of another billed plan that were both using the same airspace. I took this wording to heart and therefore would have no remorse (very occasionally) using MyWi to briefly tether in a pinch since AT&T's tethering offering for sale is "incompatible with my data plan due to technical limitations." Note that I haven't done this, but the option is there.

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience with Android, the wireless tether apps on the market that are FREE require ROOT, the ones that don't require root make you pay for the app. Plus, the carriers heavily modify Android on the devices. They can decide what is on the device, and they can block applications from the market. ATT somehow even blocks side loading. You have to root the phone, so that you can put a custom ROM on there.

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone can tether "out of the box" also, but not without being "activated" by ATT to allow the tethering. People jailbreak so they can access apps like MyWi which flip on the tethering without ATT's "help." Also, MyWi existed before ATT was officially allowing tethering (despite the hardware supporting it).

Also they jailbreak to keep their grandfathered unlimited plans, instead of paying the same for a limited plan ON TOP of the tethering surcharge (that doesn't come with extra data). Most of us refuse to pay $20/mo more just to be able to toggle a switch on the phone...

Re:Is this just an iPhone thing?

[LVSlushdat]

Just ONE more reason to stay the hell away from Steve's locked-down crap.... Not just Droids, but even bottom-of-line Samsung Intercepts will tether without rooting with a fantastic little free app called PDANet....

ATT and Nokia E71

[trailerparkcassanova]

Not the ATT-supplied E71x. I can tether using my Medianet account with this phone. Also a RAZR v3xx makes a very good tethering device. Both work very well and it was my only net access for a few months.

All this heavy handed crap...

[Red_Chaos1]

...is just making Sprint look better and better really. Unless the guy at the Sprint store was lying to me, they don't care if you tether, they don't seem to care if you root, and they still have unlimited data (though apparently you need to root and such to avoid throttling at some point).

Re:All this heavy handed crap...

[hedwards]

To be honest, Sprint has problems, but poor reception was never a problem I had with them. Incompetent customer service yes, inability to use whatever phone I like, yes, but I never had reception problems the way that I now do with AT&T.

Re:All this heavy handed crap...

[Red_Chaos1]

Oh I'm sure they've got weaknesses, everyone has them, but in this sense, they're turning out to be the least dick-ish of companies. I used to hate Sprint back when I sold phones 10 years ago (I started out with my service being Airtouch, before they conglomerated into Verizon). They had lousy reception, the phones sucked, and they paid lower bonuses for selling phones and signing people up for service.

By comparison, they've really turned stuff around it seems.

Re:All this heavy handed crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Sprint and i use a metric ass-load of data and I have never had any throttling issues.

Re:All this heavy handed crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

I tether my sprint phone on occasion but very very rarely. I am not going to pay 30 dollars a month for less than a GB of traffic that I actually use it for. I only use it when both my cable internet is out or i am somewhere without wifi and even then 90% of that time i am using it to tether to my asus transformer.

Re:All this heavy handed crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

He was.

Re:All this heavy handed crap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, I use Sprint, have for years. Two phone plan with my wife and I, two Android phones, cost me about $90 /month (soon to be $110 with the price hike), I purchased easy tether for my Samsung moment last year, but have since purchased a Motorola photon that offers a wifi hotspot, so I probably won't use easy tether any more. I am on call and use my unlimited data plan to connect my work laptop to VPN, it's a little sluggish but works well enough.
I'd recommend sprint as the best carrier for data users. Honestly they used to be such a dirty company, but my recent dealings with them have been down right pleasing. They really tried to work with me and keep me as a customer.

Who wins in this race to the bottom?

[erroneus]

Punishing customers, limiting services, lies in advertising... and we in the US continue to tolerate it. I don't and I won't but I am not large enough in numbers to make any difference. I just have to wonder what is wrong with the majority of people who are too lazy to vote with their dollars and to shop around for what's best. Damned sheeple.

Re:Who wins in this race to the bottom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, lead the way. Is there a wireless company that *doesn't* pull this kind of shit regularly?

Anyone?

Bueller?

I didn't think so.

Re:Who wins in this race to the bottom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Best? What "best"? Constantly rising prices and low quality are now staples of the US cell phone industry and the "competition" is laughable. It's no wonder when companies like Verizon spend over $4 million in the first quarter alone lobbying. The cell phone industry is now nothing more than a shared monopoly and something needs to be done about it.

Re:Who wins in this race to the bottom?

[erroneus]

Agreed but the problem is lobbying. That crap needs to go away and nothing short of a revolution will change that. As things are, the chances of electing "reformists" and "anti-corruptionists" into office is pretty much nill. There would be smears and labelling campaigns... and if by some miracle that didn't work, there would be assassinations. There are some pretty nameless and faceless powerful people making things as they are and they would rather doom the country and the whole planet than to give up anything they have now. And if you think that goes a little far, look back at Ross Perot's presidential campaign and how well that went. First they tried to make fun of him, then they tried to smear him, then he dropped out citing threats to his family. (And I believe that happened -- nothing else could stop a man like Perot from getting what he wants)

Meanwhile, people look to strategies such as "voting against" someone else and only voting for people they consider to be "electable," This essentially turns elections into the same stupidity as the stock market -- trends follow worries, fears and emotions rather than reality. (Seriously, why would the US credit rating have so much affect on perceived US companies when they are all "multinational" now?)

Idiocracy... idiocracy.

Re:Who wins in this race to the bottom?

[LVSlushdat]

Hey, lead the way. Is there a wireless company that *doesn't* pull this kind of shit regularly?

Anyone?

Bueller?

I didn't think so.

Simple: Dump the flippin' contracts.. Once a carrier has you in its clutches with a 2 year contract, they could care less how they treat you, because if you leave, they empty your wallet. Interesting note: I mistakenly bought a Sprint-branded Samsung Intercept, thinking I could squeeze it onto VM, since they share the same radios, alas, I learned a lot about how stupid/crooked cell carriers are.. Just for fun, I went into a Sprint store with my Sprint android phone, and asked about any non-contract plans since I HAVE MY OWN PHONE.. 1st Droid: No way!! you gotta have a contract.. His Manager: There ARE NO no-contract plans.. My reply: Gee I thought the contract was to cover the carrier's subsidizing of a phone if I leave before that subsidy is paid back... Silly me.. I HAVE MY OWN PHONE!! Can you tell me what the benefit to me would be to signing a contract with you for two years in this case??? Droid+Manager: Blank_Look..... Bottom line: Go with VirginMobile/MetroPCS/Boost.. Prepaid wireless all the way.. I can't speak to Boost or MetroPCS as I've never done biz with them. However, I've been with VM on a dumb-phone since 2003, on their PAYG 20cents/min plan. Recently I realized I was getting really tired of needing to do *something* to one of the home/work servers I maintain while chugging around town. In the old days that meant finding a McDonalds or Starbucks and firing the laptop up... This became REALLY tiresome.. So I decided to look into getting an Android smartphone.. I never once even considered an iPhone, though several friends have/recommend them. When you put AT&T together with Apple, you get a gooshy mess that I have NO desire to step in... Since I DO NOT do phone contracts EVER, my only options were the above prepaid carriers. Both MetroPCS and Boost have Android support, but their monthly charges are WAAAY higher than VM. So I bought a VM-branded Samsung Intercept on eBay and went with the $25/mo 300 min/"unlimited" data/text. Couldn't be happier.. Though I hear that $25/mo is going to $35 next month, but sources say that if you're on the plan now, you'll be grandfathered... we'll see...

Credo Mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on my second rooted Android phone on Credo Mobile with unlimited data and I've never received any complaints about my tethering. This is doubly great for me whenever Comcast cuts out (which is far too frequent).

While the phones on Credo are a few generations behind, they do donate toward user-chosen progressive causes and encourage Credo subscribers to speak out against such activities as the proposed AT&T / T-Mobile merger.

Not available in all areas, but worth checking out: http://www.credomobile.com/

VPN?

[utkonos]

I wonder if they would be able to figure it out and block you if you use a VPN to tunnel all of your traffic through an encrypted tube?

Re:VPN?

[Bucky24]

They'd just start blocking people who were sending encrypted traffic and weren't known to be associated with enterprise.

tmobile

[mehtars]

I have tmobile, with an andorid. I pay 25 USD for unlimited data and thethering. The first 2 gigs per month are unrestricted and after that they throttle me. I quite happy with this arrangement. (never exceeded 2 gigs for tethering). Its fast too.

Re:tmobile

[Z00L00K]

To me it looks like there are too little competition on the mobile market in the US.

Re:tmobile

[molafish]

Man I really cringe listening to horror stories on AT&T and Verizon. I have Tmobile with an n900 and android running froyo for the wife. Couldn't be happier. Our unlimited data plans are $10 for me and $25 for her (Tmobile knows which IMEI numbers belong to their Tmobile branded android phones, so they charge more for their smartphone plan on those). Tethering is easy. The unlimited plan itself does get throttled after a certain amount of bandwidth. I've only exceeded that once and I had definitely downloaded more than 2GB before it was throttled. But even then I didn't notice the throttling, my xfer speeds through sftp stayed constant.

Re:tmobile

[CaptainLard]

With the new pricing coming out from t-mobile, I would absolutely switch to them from Verizon...if only I knew they weren't going to be bought by AT&T in 6 months.

Re:tmobile

[FunkyELF]

We moved recently and didn't have cable internet at home yet so we were tethering.
My fiancé tethered to her laptop and watched the entire Casey Anthony murder trial.
She got a txt telling her that she'd be throttled, but it didn't even impact her ability to stream the trial video.

Tmobile also has a "relationship" (twitter) with Steve Kondik (of Cyanogenmod custom ROM).
They have sent him hardware.
Whether you view this as them endorsing the jailbreaking / tethering community is up to you.

Here's how to make people happy, telcos

[MasaMuneCyrus]

Although there are a lot of crazy people that want to watch Hulu and stream HD radio over their wireless network all day every day, I think most people are reasonable.

Firstly, text messages should be free and unlimited. It is time to do this. They cost the carriers basically nothing. In Japan, text messages cost close to nothing and voice plans cost money. This makes sense. Voice is orders of magnitude more bandwidth-hogging than a tweet.

Next, data plans needn't be unlimited, but make a reasonable data cap -- enough for someone to play on the internet, read blogs with pictures, and play on youtube at least nightly.

Make customizable account settings for notifications when you are approaching your cap. Do you want daily data usage texts? Weekly? One text every 1GB? One text every 500MB? There should be options for that. And there should be an official app to show current monthly data usage, and there should also be a number to text message that will reply back with the same information (if, say, you are in an area with poor mobile data reception)

Put throttling in your account settings. And give it advanced scheduling features. If we are going to have data caps, we want to be able to use our phones effectively. That means a simple and easy way to say, "I want full 4GB speeds in the morning, but throttle my speeds to 2mbps between 7:30pm and 12:30am." I should be able to turn on and off throttling easily, set exactly how fast I want to throttle, I should be able to schedule throttling at different speeds at different times of the day, or set up my connection to throttle down to 4mbps when I read 2GB for the month, and 2mbps when I reach 3GB for the month, etc. If we're going to be expected to keep an eye on our bandwidth usage, you need to give us powerful ways to control ourselves.

And lastly, no obscene overage charges. If the bandwidth cap is broken, suspend the internet and send an immediate text message. Give two options explicitly and clearly in the text message: 1. throttle the speeds (come on, at least 768kbps down, 256kbps up. less than dial-up speeds are unacceptable) OR 2. continue with 4G speeds and charge per kilobyte used, but charge at the same rate as the plan that you're on. That means that if I'm getting data at $10 per 1 GB, I expect to be charged 1 cent per additional 1 MB. It is not acceptable to charge me 1 cent per 1 MB while under my cap, and then $1 per 1 MB when I go over my cap. The rates should be exactly the same. And I should be able to easily switch between the two at any time that I want.

And though it seems like common sense to normal people, it apparently isn't common sense to companies -- BE TRANSPARENT. If you don't respect your customers, your customers will not respect you. If the company says, "we're working hard to do A, B, C, and D, and we will have E, F, and G caps until we can finish," the customers will understand. If you say, "we are working to upgrade our network infrastructure to introduce A speeds and B increased cap by C date," the customers will be understanding and happy. Everything should be laid out clear and simple for the customer. It should not be hidden away or disguised. There will always be a "top 5%", no matter how much or how little data people use. If it gets to the point where everyone is using tons of data, it may be time to consider upgrading your infrastructure. Spend the money and do it. When you're done, advertise your new infrastructure and watch how you will *gasp* out-compete your competitors.

Re:Here's how to make people happy, telcos

[MasaMuneCyrus]

And another thing that all companies nowadays -- not just telcos -- seem to have forgotten is the art of dealing with customers. Maybe you see us as walking bags of money. Fine, that's great. But it's no reason to treat us poorly. Treat the walking bags of money like shit, and they will do everything they can to exploit loopholes, bend rules, and steal. Treat the walking bags of money nicely and they will turn into loyal walking bags of money. It's not rocket science.

Re:Here's how to make people happy, telcos

[gorzek]

They have poor customer service precisely so they won't have to deal with with the "walking bags of money." They just want you to fork it over and leave them alone. Customer service departments are understaffed because they're cost centers, and once you're talking to a person their #1 objective is to just get you off the phone as quickly as possible. Companies the size of Verizon don't have the staff to provide strong customer service--they just don't. They don't want to spend money on it, either.

And why should they care about loyalty? They've got you locked into a contract. You can pay the termination fee and go to AT&T and deal with the same shit. I have Sprint, and while their customer service isn't terrible, their billing department is completely inept and wait times on hold are so bad I never call them unless I have absolutely no other choice.

All the telcos are huge and have failed to invest enough to provide good customer service. They could, but it would cut down profits and take money away from other things--or raise your bill, which customers would certainly go apeshit about again.

Basically, telcos have no reason to change the way they do anything. There are only a handful of them in the US and they don't differ much in how shitty they are.

Re:Here's how to make people happy, telcos

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically, telcos have no reason to change the way they do anything. There are only a handful of them in the US and they don't differ much in how shitty they are.

Well said.

I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't understand Verizon... Well, actually, I do... Far too well.

You see, at the same time they're doing this, they're trying to get all the bandwidth-hungry features they can in theirs and 3rd party apps to make sure you use as much bandwidth as possible. This along with eliminating the traffic mediation, so you pay just as much for the bandwidth use by Verizon apps vs 3rd-party apps, which had been sacrosanct. Thou shall not fuck with revenue assurance (dept).

Hell, they WANT you to use as much bandwidth on 4G as you can. The more you use, the faster their infrastructure pays for itself. This move is probably aimed at 3G networks, since they don't want to invest any more in that legacy technology, only to have it become obsolete. But 4G tethering, hell, they'll love you for that, because you're paying for it.

On the plus side, you get IPv6 with 4G/LTE as well. Cox is trying, but VerizonWireless may be the one to bring IPv6 into the mainstream market, en-mass. If you want to make a 4G service, you're making it IPv6 soon, rather than later.

T-mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

i got g2x on tmobile, pay $70 for unlimited voice/data. The phone comes with built in usb or wifi tether so no jailbreak necessary. I believe they cap data at 2gigs per month. when connected through 4g , theoretically , i get up to 42Mbps

Free down under

[Anonymous Coward]

Carriers in Australia tried it, was considered anti competative because they introduced the 'fee' for tethering about a year after people had been using it without any reference in the contracts. It's now free, you simply call them and they deal with the dumb system that is Apple and it gets turned on for your Imei....

Greed is good?

[Chadwill]

Who would want such a provider that denies how you should use your data?? Thats just insane.. Im just glad that the average data plan here is unlimited without any restrictions in bandwith etc

I have to say it again and again

[drolli]

Flatrates are stupid things. They should be forbidden. They are just a formulation for: "We will make absurd prices for metered plans so that we can scare everybody into using an oversized flatrate plan and if somebody really exceeds our usage expectations using some means, then we block (or slow down) the type of service he uses". Its maximally intransparent.

The only solution would be to only allow metered and unfiltered rates, because then the customers would have an easy time comparing the offers and it would be easy to detect a deviation from the simple (unfiltered) rule.

Re:I have to say it again and again

[gorzek]

It actually puzzles me why they don't offer a simple set of tiered plans, based on their aggregate usage statistics:

1. Occasional User Plan. Not many minutes, not much data. Cheap plan useful primarily for calls of 1-2 minutes at a time, emergencies, and occasional email checking. This could be in the $10-15 range.
2. Regular User Plan. A good number of minutes, unlimited texting, a modest amount of data. Suitable for more calling, occasional video/music streaming, etc. Not sure what this should cost, but maybe $20-30, or higher if it's got more wiggle room. This plan should be designed to cover the usage of, say, 2/3 of all customers.
3. Power User Plan. More minutes, more data. Obviously, this should cost more. $40-60 range? It should cover at least the bottom 95% of all users, and be designed accordingly. And that brings us to...
4. Unlimited User Plan. Do absolutely anything you want, no restrictions. Charge a fuckload for it, whatever. It can be there for the people who want it and the price will discourage those who don't have a legitimate need for massive amounts of usage.

Re:I have to say it again and again

[drolli]

Why not just meter it and give the user the option at which consumption he wants to stop/throttle it?

Re:I have to say it again and again

[Bucky24]

I imagine a lot of users wouldn't really understand how to set those options. I think it's a fine plan though.

I honestly can't understand why...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any sane American would go with this company. All I hear is bad news stories about it. Are they the only ones with decent coverage or something? Or is it cheaper rates? The two things in America I don't think I could ever use are the airlines and the phone networks.

Re:I honestly can't understand why...

[Verteiron]

For most of the US there are only 4 cell phone options, period. All 4 are blatantly evil companies that are out to screw every last penny out of you while denying you service whenever possible. In most rural locations there are really only 2 options: AT&T and Verizon. These are the two most evil of the bunch. If you don't like what either one is selling, you do without cell phone service.

Occasionally you get lucky and a small company like, say, Iowa Wireless may provide slightly less rapacious rates, but typically they only cover a small region and offer out-of-date phones.

Why yes, the cell phone service situation in the USA IS absolutely insane.

Re:I honestly can't understand why...

[Voyager529]

The reason why most people I know who have Verizon have it are as follows:

-Verizon has been traditionally known for having among the best reception available, and this isn't without merit. The USA is a fairly large country with regards to the geographic region that needs to be blanketed with towers. Verizon has traditionally been the service most available to the most people. Similarly, Verizon's use of CDMA actually has a lick of merit in this regard - CDMA can route a single call through multiple towers simultaneously, so if one tower's signal drops the others can hold the call. GSM is one tower at a time, and as a T-Mo subscriber this is a pain since my house is equidistant from three separate towers. The call gets handed off between the three towers like a hot potato, which causes the calls to drop at an annoying rate. Everywhere else besides my home it's great, but it's an unfortunate limitation of the system.

-Verizon usually has the best rates and service regarding corporate accounts, so it's very common for people with company phones to have them Verizon issued. AT&T has gotten better in this regard, but again I'll berate T-Mo for being about the only carrier to exclusively cater to consumers.

-Verizon has the most subscribers nationwide. Since each network has 'in' calling where calls to other subscribers of the same company are free, it can create a situation where it's possible to sign up for a 600 minute/month plan instead of a 1,200 minute or unlimited plan if half the calls you make don't run the meter.

-When I compared the speedtest.net results from my T-Mobile phone and my Verizon phone (both running Android, both with full bar 3G reception), the scores were pretty close. T-Mobile had a bit better speed (chalk it up to fewer people on the tower), but Verizon had a sub-100ms ping, which is impressive for a cell carrier.

Trust me, I'm NO fan of Verizon. I have stuck by T-Mobile despite living in dropped call central so that I don't have to deal with AT&T or Verizon (though Sprint is my next move the day the Death Star takes over). At the same time, I do have some respect for the reasons why other people choose them.

Light, intermittent prepaid -- t-mobile, is good

[Mendenhall]

I am a t-mobile prepaid customer, with one of their LG Android Optimus-T handsets, which I got for $130 refurb.
I can get legal tethering from them by setting up the phone as a mobile hotspot for $1.50 a day. If
you use it every day, it is quite expensive, but if you just use it a few days a month for travel or
whatever, it is great. They give you 30 MB of very high speed (I think I have seen 1 MB/sec peaks),
and unlimited 2G for the rest of the day. If you are just checking email, or doing bandwidth-restricted
video chat back home for a while, it is plenty.

I juts got back from a conference trip, where the hotel charged $10/day for internet and you
couldn't even get it in the main conference area, and they didn't even have free internet in the
lobby. I spent my $1.50/day, and was able to edit code via ssh, talk to my wife via video chat
for a while, and look at the web. I had to make sure I did the video chat at the beginning of the
session, while I still was under the 30 MB throttling limit.

Re:What about the new FCC law the says any app and

[KillaBeave]

Mod parent up. Was just thinking of a ridiculous support call I had with Comcast around 8 years ago. Actually it was during the initial hookup. Nearly had to throw the tech out of my house when he tried to put a CD in my desktop! I ended up just having the onsite tech hand me the phone as I read off the MCA address I wanted them to authorize. (Do they still even do that?)

Why do they care about tethering??

[Kaitiff]

It's absurdly simple people. They care about tethering because it's another 'service' they can charge for. If you're doing it for free, they can't make a big deal out of it and charge 30, 40 or even 50 bucks a person to DO it. Your average Joe doesn't understand the 'magic smoke' in the phone that lets them surf the internet from their phone. That ignorance allows the carriers to act like it's a big deal and charge extra for it. Same thing with text messaging. There was never a financial or technical burden to provide the service; it was simply another way they could make money from the ignorance of their customers. I don't blame the cell phone carriers, not really. Any corporation is a completely amoral entity. It's like blaming a bee for stinging. They are DESIGNED and CREATED to make money and any way they can do that is justified. Oversight, regulation and protecting the citizens is the job of Government. Too bad we've allowed our government (in the US) to be bought and sold by the corporations so they have no interest in doing the job they were elected to do....

TANSTAAFL

[ThatsNotPudding]

Not only does TELUS allow tethering, they actively encourage it. When they updated my Motorola milestone to froyo they bundled a tethering app that was not previously there. Additionally they are selling wifi only tablets and bragging that you don't need a separate data plan, you can simply use tethering. (according to the website "Share one data plan between your smartphone and tablet at no extra cost. It's easy, affordable, worry-free and secure." (bold text in original)) Now as for the plans themselves... these need major work, the biggest plan you can buy from TELUS is 5gig. They simply don't sell a bigger plan than that. I find this rather abysmally low.

Something has to give; you (or rather, every subscriber) can't have both.

Re:TANSTAAFL

[LateArthurDent]

Something has to give; you (or rather, every subscriber) can't have both.

I don't think he was implying he wanted more than 5gigs at no extra cost. He wants the option of buying into a more expensive smartphone data plan that allows for more than 5 gigs a month. Then he wants to tether at no extra cost. That's a perfectly reasonable position.

How will this work once IPV6 comes home to roost?

[Anonymous Coward]

How this convoluted, clusterfuck of a design ever going to work with IPV6?

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use my phone to make phone calls.

most routers can clone a MAC address now days

[Joe_Dragon]

most routers can clone a MAC address now days

Re:most routers can clone a MAC address now days

[KillaBeave]

The one I was using then was cloning my desktop and had been for a few years at that point. The issue was the tech didn't know how to send the MAC address to the home office to authorize it on the network ... or even that he needed to send the MAC address in the first place. The application on the CD he wanted to install did all this for him, but it also added a bunch of bloatware and changed the title bar in IE plus othe annoying stuff that I didn't feel like hunting down and killing.

PDAnet

[Anonymous Coward]

PDAnet+HTC incredible(unrooted)+verizon = this post.
only 1x where I reside so no gaming or major video usage, but no problems either. been doing it for at least 6 months

The key here is Jailbroken Tethering.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

The HTC incredible 2 comes with a tethering app built in, and I've yet to have them bother me about it.
And I sure as hell don't pay them $20 extra a month for it.

Re:Bheem

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off and die spammer! I don't give a FUCK about your "Custom Essay Writing" site!

Imagine if power companies charged the same way

[Johnny5k]

Your monthly plan options: $50/mo just to turn on your connection; then: Plan A: $1 per kWh; Plan B: $100 for 900 kWh, $100 for each additional 900kWh (if you go over by even 1 kWh); Plan C: $200 for 10,000 kWh, $75 for each additional 5,000kWh. But it's an extra $50/mo if you want to use a furnace, air conditioner or refrigerator. And you can never be sure just how much you've used, because their tracking system is always a day behind; so if it's the end of December, and you're worried you're getting close because you've been using the heat AND you just cooked a Christmas ham for 4 hours -- you better just eat cold ham until the new year, or you might get charged an extra $100. (for reference the average US household used 920 kWh in 2008, at average cost of $0.12 per kWh http://bit.ly/rklWCn). It's not perfect, but this is basically what the wireless providers are getting away with. The biggest difference is, using electricity costs the provider a certain amount per kWh to produce; data streams don't, or at least the cost is insignificant; so it's even more outrageous that the wireless providers are getting away with it. When plans were really unlimited, they might have been able to get away with limiting the devices we could use to pull down that data; but now that we're paying for a set allocation of data, there is no reason they should be able to limit the devices we're allowed to use, charging more for specific devices.

Re:Imagine if power companies charged the same way

[NameIsDavid]

Not really. The equivalent would be if your power company charged a flat rate for unlimited electrical use, based on the tacit assumption that there were only so many gadgets and appliances that a regular house would ever run. Then, you go and install a huge cable from your house to your huge office park across the street in order for that park to take advantage of your house's unlimited power plan. The problem is all the assumptions either implied or in fine print. Companies shouldn't be allowed to offer unlimited service at a flat rate. Such things are untenable, business-wise, since networks can't handle infinite traffic. If a company means that you can use as much data as a given device can consume, that's what the plan should say. The restrictions against another device tapping into that plan's data allotment should be spelled out clearly in advance of a customer signing the contract. Better yet, offer a metered plan that is device agnostic and perhaps which has an escalating cost for the highest monthly data caps as needed to keep network congestion reasonable.

Sprint/PDANet

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently there is an App called PDANet that allows smartphone users to tether their phones without jailbreaking or otherwise hacking the phone. They offer a free version which will not let you access secure sites (https), or for a one time fee of about $16USD you get the full version and updates whenever they appear. I know this works on the Sprint network, I'd think it would work on others.
With an unlimited data plan, though I grant it is not always the fastest connection out in rural nowhere, it gets the job done and is way easier to stomach than the $30/month plan offered by Sprint.

Come on people open your eyes...

[pdfsmail]

I personally think all phone companies are not trying to expand as fast as they can and are using that as a scheme to charge more for data plans etc... Also forcing their current workers to work really hard, giving the illusion they are trying. Again another company leading us backwards in technology, thanks Verizon!

Maybe you should cut the pay of your CEOs and use that to hire more people to expand faster, obviously are are not fast enough. To me you are hypocritical, based on all your commercials on how fast you are etc.. but you restrict us and charge us more and more at every turn.

Someone needs to whip these cell and TV/Internet companies, and soon... funny how many other countries have systems that handle uncapped unlimited everything plans but we can't.. I know we have the capability, its just the companies are aware that people here are ignorant and they can get away with it. Offering us less and saving them even more money... Now is not the time to be trying to sqeeze the economy like these companies have been by restricting us and charging more.... but of course no one has what it takes to do anything about it do they??? Probably, but too lazy to do anything I guess...

Long live T-mobile.

[Anonymous Coward]

T-mobile is dead. Long live T-mobile.

They can't...

[Kamiza Ikioi]

...if you do it right.

Root the phone, install firewall, route all traffic from phone and tether through Orbot (Tor) or private encrypted proxy. All traffic looks identical. Problem solved.

One more year . . .

[MBGMorden]

Verizon is becoming less and less palatable to me as time goes on. I've only stuck with them as long as I have because their service is the ONLY one that picks up in the boondocks where I live. My contract expires in a year though, and right about that time I'm also planning on moving closer to work. Not sure what I'm switching to (at this point I'm honestly looking at Crickett), but anything has got to be better than the overcharging behemoth that is Verizon.

Boned

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but the rest of us have been doing this on Verizon for over a year, and now we're boned. Will Sprint be next?

Re:Boned

[Totenglocke]

Possibly, but I'd argue not likely. It's a wonderful market for Sprint to maintain - be the only US carrier to provide unlimited data and not rape your customers for tethering fees (those stupid enough to pay for tethering packages are a bonus, but don't punish the ones smart enough to get around it). I already know a good dozen people who switched from Verizon to Sprint and with the horrific data plans Verizon is changing to, I'm sure that number will increase. Sprint just needs to make sure to take advantage of this and advertise the hell out of their superior data plans.

Best feedback is here

[k4b]

uh no. .they're doing it because they can. why invest in infrastructure when they can artificially hike prices?

Legality?

[lonecrow]

How can this even be legal? I mean, I pay for electricity but the utility can't tell me that I can't plug a toaster in?

It is such a blatant bullshit cash grab why hasn't this practice been blocked by all the consumer protection and commerce laws out there? Isn't there something that applies?