And how much do you think AT&T should be charging for this?
I am currently paying them $174+ for two iPhones and another 69.- for DSL at home.... That's close to 3 grand a year. Me & my wife are not even using 1GB of data on the phones together per month and I'm sure so are most users....
So do you think I should pay another $ 700.- a year just to tether once in a while?
Why on earth should it be free? You're "unlimited data" was for use on your iPhone! ...not your laptop when you're out and about or your home or business or who knows where else people will try and milk the network for all it's got.
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No I don't think you should pay $700 to tether. I don't think you should tether AT ALL.
You're paying $70 a month for DSL? Seriously!? I have a 1.5mbps connection which is pretty fast I think - unless you're downloading massive movies which I am not) for $30 a month. So that's bad shopping on your part. But as for the 1gb data usage a month--okay, fair deal, I DO think AT&T should have a non-data option for the iPhone for people who are fine with just using wi-fi when they need to do some web because it sounds like either you or your wife or both are casual internet users. Yeah $30 a month is ridiculous and it WOULD make more sense for you to look at your plan in terms of the 5GB cap. But each person is different. Somebody at the top took a look at everyone and decided that X was the plan they were gonna offer. Do I like it? No way! I have a minutes plan that's $59 bucks + $20 for texting (that's your rip off there - talk about MINIMAL data usage to send a text--that's what you all should be harping on) + $30 for data which I'm like you - maybe a gig a month? I have some corporate/FAN discounts so probably I'm at $90 a month taxes included but still that is ridiculous. I'm not disagreeing there.
But I'll be even more ticked if I'm paying $90 a month and my internet starts slowing down because of people on their laptops tethering!
I RESTATE MY ARGUMENT that the web experience you get on your iPhone requires far less bandwidth than what your laptop would be using because of two factors: 1) iPhone sites formatted for the phone - and alot are; they aren't as media rich and much smaller in size so they aren't that many kb in size... and 2) on your computer you're going to have people downloading stuff and file sharing and facebooking and uploading pictures and all that stuff. If it was just checking e-mail only it's a no brainer...very minimal affect on the network but the question then is how do you regulate that? How do you separate average Joe user from Hackmaster Gamer who's going to find every way possible to take advantage of his tethering, sharing the connection with the college apartments in every direction from his and downloading torrents like they're going out of style. That's my whole premise. This is just asking for trouble if they just enable tethering, no questions asked. There has to be regulation and terms and guidelines and knowing AT&T they will add those long after the fact because that's the kind of crisis mode planning that they do.