Verizon Offers Free Tethering Because It Has To

jfruh writes "Most U.S. wireless carriers are trying to have it both ways on tethering or smartphones-as-hotspots — moving people from unlimited data plans to plans where they pay by the gigabyte, but then also charging them extra if they want to share the gigabytes they've paid for with other devices. But on Android phones on Verizon, at least, you can still tether, not because Verizon is trying to be more consumer friendly, but because, according to an FCC ruling, they agreed to allow it when they bought formerly public spectrum."

Comments

Re:Not just Android devices

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worked from day one on Android as well.

Oh no! Regulation!

[Goaway]

Look how GOVERNMENT REGULATION is ruining things for the consumer again!

Re:Oh no! Regulation!

[CoolToe]

Look how GOVERNMENT REGULATION is ruining things for the consumer again!

That's why communism is ultimately the best way to go. Only with government regulation and government work program you can expect everything to go well for everyone.

Sure, there are no rich people anyway, but more people (all people) get to enjoy good life.

Re:Oh no! Regulation!

[jellomizer]

Yes, Lets go to the extremism. If some of it is good and a little bit more is better, then all of it must be best.

The trick is to find the right balance that our culture can tolerate.

Re:Oh no! Regulation!

[DavidTC]

No shit.

I remember when cable companies used to charge you per TV. And people would illegally run splitters and cable and have to disconnect it before calling the cable company.

And then, suddenly, bam, the cable company wasn't allowed to do that anymore, by law.

The sky did not fall.

And did the sky fall after jailbreaking was legalized?

And remember when the phone company only allowed you to connect _their_ phones to the line?

There is no reason that the programs or devices using a telephone's data connection should be the slightest concern of the telephone company, any more than it's their business what sort of headphones you have hooked up to it or anything.

In fact, it's not actually their business what sort of phone you're using, or what the hell a 'phone' is. If I take my SIM out of my unlimited data phone and stick it in a cellular modem, that should be entirely fine. As long as my SIM is paid for and all the frequency and encoding stuff is correct, they should be required to provide me service. (And it's not actually their concern if the encoding is wrong...that's the FCC's problem.)

Corporate America has demonstrated over and over that they will put infinite amounts of restrictions on the services they sell us, claiming all sorts of bullshit reasons that such things must exist...and then laws stop that, and nothing bad happens. Everyone lives happily ever after.

We really need to that to happen with cell phones.

In fact, an argument can be made that it should happen with data vs. voice. You should have to pay for 'tower bandwidth' usage, and then maybe some sort of microscopic 'megabyte transferred to the internet' or 'minutes of phone call onto the public phone network', but the majority of the cost for the phone company is 'talking to the tower' (Or, rather, maintaining enough tower for everyone who wants to talk to them to use.) and _that_ is what the majority of the cost should be for.

And SMS are fucking free, you asshats. That is goddamn cellular overhead. You can't charge us for a variant of something that every single powered-on cell phone does every minute.

It's stuff like this

[rtkluttz]

That prove that consumer protections in the electronics industry are badly needed. Enshrine the separation of hardware and software in all electronics, and enshrine that owners cannot be locked out of their own devices.

Tethering is a built in function of all android devices that is artificially crippled because crap like this is allowed to go on. Yea yea yea, I know you can hack YOUR OWN DEVICE and put a different OS of your own choice on it. I already do that (cyanogenmod), but you shouldn't have to hack past security that locks you out of your own electronics.

Actually...

[TheSpoom]

They still offer the built-in tethering on 4G devices for $20 / mo. I know this because I have one of these devices. You have to install a third party app from the market to get free tethering. Verizon is relying on consumer ignorance of the FCC decision to continue to grab revenue.

Actually it is a problem

[SuperKendall]

You might think forced free tethering is awesome.

Here's the actual effect it has had - everyone gets to pay more for data since everyone has to be able to tether. The new mandatory shared data plans are more expensive than older piecemeal plans. WHat about people that didn't want to pay for tethering? Too bad.

Re:Actually it is a problem

[dgatwood]

Well, you might argue that the existence of a regulatory body like the FCC is part of the reason there are only a handful of nationwide U.S. carriers. That would be a somewhat specious argument (because in the absence of regulation, you'd probably also have a couple of jerks broadcasting broadband noise that makes the entire radio spectrum unusable), but many people make it anyway.

The real problem is that building out cellular infrastructure is expensive, and having multiple redundant infrastructures is expensive. This makes competition hard, and makes monopolies or oligopolies the default steady state. Without government intervention, such a market tends to be inherently anti-consumer. So you have to have either regulations that force competition or regulations that limit what the major players can do.

I could perhaps see a regulatory approach that limits the number of towers within a 30-mile radius to something on the order of one, and requires the carriers to sell off the remaining towers or spin them off into separate companies. That would result in a bunch of competing nationwide cellular networks that are forced to make roaming deals with one another in order to even function in cities. Combine this with rules that require interoperability (choose a single national standard) and rules that require RAND-ish tower access agreements, and you might actually get some real competition. Unfortunately, they'd probably choose a broken standard where handoffs between roaming and non-roaming cells isn't possible, and then you'd just make city-dwellers as cellularly miserable as folks out in the country....

Definitely NOT FREE

[calzones]

They don't offer free tethering because you have to pay for what you consume.

That other companies have the temerity to charge you extra just for the privilege of tethering is a whole other problem. That would be like the water company charging you extra for the privilege of using water to wash with instead of just drinking it.

The fact is, we pay for data plans, unlimited or metered. Either way, it should be ours to do as we wish with! The telcos should not be allowed (should not have any right) to impose on us any kinds of fees or limitations on what we have purchased from them. End of story.

Re:Not just Android devices

[Immerman]

I think it comes down to volume - you end to use far more bandwidth for longer periods on a PC, and since there's very little actual competition in the US market the carriers are in no hurry to build out capacity to actually provide the service they're charging for - which requires unpleasant things like investment that doesn't contribute to anybody's bonuses. Worse, once you have a network with enough capacity to handle the load non-tethering people might start asking uncomfortable questions like why they're being charged such ridiculous rates. Nothing good can come of it.

paying for tethering? right...

[l3v1]

I mean come on, it has to be the U.S where people actually acept that tethering is some extra special "service" and it's justifiable to ask extra money for "providing" it. If my carrier would ask money for that, I'd leave them on the spot. I changed carriers for less than that, and the world didn't collapse. For a long time I thought the U.S. was the paradise of Internet and mobile phones and unlimited data plans. But then I actually started to go there a lot and it was farly quick to realize most cell companies just take people for fools, take subscribers as granted, rip them off with a lot of stupid stuff, and just see them and an endless money source. And the most weird thing, lots of people are so used so used to this, that they don't even think about it much anymore.