What Should We Pay For?

[Jon Westfall]

One of my friends, a new Pocket PC Phone convert, was a bit dismayed last night when it took him a few hours to get his new HTC Touch to teather correctly to his laptop. He was doing all the right steps, but the phone was a no-go. The really odd part? Well, the phone had teathered just fine at his home in Charlottesville, VA and at my place outside Toledo, OH - but now in San Francisco, CA, it was having none of the internet sharing goodness he wanted.<br /><br />Why? Well it seems that while he had an unlimited data plan on his phone and the phone would teather just fine over the slower 1xRTT connections in Virginia and Ohio, the faster EVDO speeds in California were causing him trouble. Long story short, in his provider's system, he had unlimited data for the phone (even highspeed data for the phone) - just not unlimited highspeed cellular data for tethering. After an hour on the phone, the representative he talked to finally was able to get the account straightened out - and he had Internet.<br /><br />Now while my friend's situation is a bit odd (His account setup was partially to blame), it got me wondering - what should we pay for? I've always felt that if I'm paying for an unlimited data plan for my phone, any way I get that data to other devices should also be covered. In my eyes, I could just as easily download the file to my phone and then copy it to the laptop, or just download it to the laptop directly. However some providers don't see it that way (Heck, some providers in other countries don't even offer unlimited data in th first place - a situation I am sympathetic to!). And we've often joked that some US providers would charge by the button-press if they had the ability to. So should we be paying extra for tethering? Extra for higher speeds even though our device supports them? Or even Extra for data in the first place when the main selling point of our devices is the data connectivity?

[iant54]

Only slightly off-topic - could someone explain what "teathering" is? I tried to Google it for a definition, but I kept getting a suggestion that I should look at "tethering"!

[jalex]

I was intrigued to hear that the provider could distinguish between teathered and otherwise. Regardless of the reason behind the internet connection being instantiated from the phone, it's just an internet connection using the fastest technologically offered by the nearby towers, no? How does the provider know my laptop asked my phone to connect and is the real consumer of the packets being carried? :?:

Either way, whether the provider can really tell or not, it's one thing to offer "unlimited" data (and I especially make use of quotes as providers will always highlight the word, themselves, in some way wherever they print it and include a corresponding footnote -- as we all know, the provider can cut you off at any time if they think you're abusing the policy).

It's another thing entirely to expect the customer to actually make use of unlimited data. I'm sure providers only expect 0.00001% (insert zeros as necessary) of users to really get on that data train and exploit the monies received from all such paying users to cover that and make a more than tidy profit. I, as a provider, would expect you, as an average customer, to maybe surf the web once a week, maybe check email maybe daily and that would be it. The vast majority of members of this forum are definitely the exception to the rule.

Even if I, as an average customer, realized I could download many / large pages / file / whatever, most of the time I'm not going to know how or be able to figure out or to have the patience for the really big stuff. Yeah, I could download a big file and then transfer it to my laptop (via flash memory, say) but what an inconvenience. I certainly couldn't surf like that.

The phone is the governer / choke / limiter. Teathering removes that constraint. If teathering were easy (or even possible on some providers' phones) then a lot more people would be doing it and, bam!, unlimited data would go away or start to become very expensive (we'd probably see some more data tiers introduced).

Ultimately, we have to pay for what the provider dictates and we, as the exceptions to the rule, will always have to pay a premium. I'm just glad we're as few in number as we are as I really enjoy not having to pay through the nose for my unlimited data today! :D

[Jon Westfall]

Only slightly off-topic - could someone explain what "teathering" is? I tried to Google it for a definition, but I kept getting a suggestion that I should look at "tethering"!

After consulting Google, it looks like there may be some argument as to the spelling of the word (Tethering is probably proper, although a lot of people seem to make my "add-an-a" version their own). In any event, it refers to the process of connecting your PDA Phone / Smartphone / Whateveryouwanttocallit to your laptop (or desktop) for the purpose of using the PDA Phone's internet connection to surf the web (or whatever) on the larger machine.

[whydidnt]

Tethering is the act of connecting your phone to your computer (or other device) and using then using the phone's internet connection for access on the computer. We call it tethering because if often involves connecting a cable between the phone and computer, though many chose to use bluetooth for this purpose.

I can understand the carriers wanting to charge a premium for this service. In my own experience, I'm quite certain I use more data when tethered than I do when constrained to the tiny screen on my WM device.

I think whether the carrier can determine if you tether or not depends on a couple of things. First if you are using the carriers "connection software" they most definitely can tell. Second, I think they can also tell by the types of requests that are made over the internet. There is software (PDAnet and USB Modem come to mind) that creates a connection but makes all of the internet requests come from the phone. My understanding is that if you use this software there would be no way for the provider to tell that the device was tethered and that you were using your phone in this way.

What is somewhat frustrating is that carriers want to charge a large premium for the privilege of tethering, but are now starting to impose limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded while tethered. If you have a standard PDA data plan on AT&amp;T, you can get "unlimited downloads". If you pay the extra $30 month for tethering, you are limited to 5 GB per month in downloads. It seems counterintuitive that they charge more for less, but I guess it comes back to my earlier statement, about using more data when tethered.

However, if you were to start using the carriers own video services on a regular basis I think it would be quite easy to use more directly on the device than you do when tethered.

[frankenbike]

I can see the carrier's point of view. I have friends with no landline internet who use strictly tethering. They pay more for exactly that service.

But say the $15 Sprint charges really isn't priced for that service.

It's one thing to use it while traveling periodically, or in emergencies or cases where your land connection fails. It's another when you're using it to download huge movie files, every day.

OTOH, say $40 a month or more for unlimited data, is a price that is designed for regular usage.

The other problem is that data pricing is still designed for kilobytes. You should be able to buy data use by the gigabyte. And that price shouldn't be all that high...say $10 per gig over the price of your plan.

Unlimited data is really a statistical misnomer...it's based on what would be unlimited for most people using only their phone as the final device. What they should be doing is giving a realistic top baseline, say at least 500 megs, and then price per gig above that. More than the price of a DVD so it's not a realistic alternative, less than the ridiculous prices based on some model they came up with in 2000.

With a model like the one I'm talking about, I could use my laptop with my phone when I need to, but not as my main connection, without paying more. But if they're thinking 150mb is anywhere near a reasonable limit, it's absurd for most WM devices, especially the way most web sites throw up a zillion pics these days.

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FB

[Nurhisham Hussein]

After consulting Google, it looks like there may be some argument as to the spelling of the word (Tethering is probably proper, although a lot of people seem to make my "add-an-a" version their own). In any event, it refers to the process of connecting your PDA Phone / Smartphone / Whateveryouwanttocallit to your laptop (or desktop) for the purpose of using the PDA Phone's internet connection to surf the web (or whatever) on the larger machine.

Actually, tethering is (generically) the process of tying something up with something else - "tether" is the root word and can be used as a noun or as a verb. "teather" doesn't even turn up on dictionary.com.