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Questions for those that received TETHERING notice from AT&T

err404 said:
Withholding tethering from the 2gb plan helps them reinforce their claim that tethering is a feature separate from regular data. If they allowed tethering on the 2gb plan, it would strengthen the claim that all data is equal. It would make it more difficult to justify restricting tethering from unlimited plans.
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Not really. I see no difference between 2 GB vs 4 GB. There is a difference with any cap vs. unlimited. What restricts unlimited is the screen size. Dealing with a phone-size screen gets old/annoying after a while. But tethering with a laptop makes everything easier, so one will naturally use more data.

With a cap (2 GB or 4 GB), that doesn't matter. Because of the plan's cap you'll still stop at those limits regardless if it's hit via the phone directly or a tethered laptop and if you do go over, you'll pay for it. The tethering fee is simply "free" money to ATT.

Anyway, I can't justify paying $80 per use for tethering each year ($20 x 12 months / estimated 3 times I'd actually use it).
 
tether to iPad only

Chopstick217 said:
I've been using 3-5gb monthly and haven't received the notice. Could it be because I only tether to my iPad?
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I would like to know how, exactly, you're tethering to your iPad and what iOS you're running. I didn't get any notifications from AT&T but I was running 4.1 until yesterday. Now, I'm JBed on 4.3.2 and am fearful of getting notified.
 
NateEssex said:
I would like to know how, exactly, you're tethering to your iPad and what iOS you're running. I didn't get any notifications from AT&T but I was running 4.1 until yesterday. Now, I'm JBed on 4.3.2 and am fearful of getting notified.
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people on all iOS versions have been notified, it has nothing to do with if you update to a newer firmware or not
 
I always tethered to my iPad 1 & 2 and I got a text 3 days ago and a letter yesterday.
 
If you tether at all you WILL receive a notice(email, txt and/or postage mail) sooner or later.

Data amount is not what att is monitoring. Firmware version, tethering program, iphone version or if device is jailbroken does not make a difference either. I don't know the technical explanation but att is monitoring if additional ips and/or mac addresses appear under your iphone connection.

You WILL have to give att a call to halt the automatic tethering service plan change. After you have spoken to customer support they will note your past tethering and will give another notice if more tethering occurs.

If you currently have the "unlimited" plan from back in the day then you are safe to use pandora, netflix and other traffic intensive programs. These will not trigger a tethering notice to att.

We are SOL. Tethering is no more unless someone someday comes up with a way to spoof att's monitoring.

I suggest removing the tethering program and value your old unlimited data plan.

my .02 cents
 
angry4nus said:
If you tether at all you WILL receive a notice(email, txt and/or postage mail) sooner or later.

Data amount is not what att is monitoring. Firmware version, tethering program, iphone version or if device is jailbroken does not make a difference either. I don't know the technical explanation but att is monitoring if additional ips and/or mac addresses appear under your iphone connection.

You WILL have to give att a call to halt the automatic tethering service plan change. After you have spoken to customer support they will note your past tethering and will give another notice if more tethering occurs.

If you currently have the "unlimited" plan from back in the day then you are safe to use pandora, netflix and other traffic intensive programs. These will not trigger a tethering notice to att.

We are SOL. Tethering is no more unless someone someday comes up with a way to spoof att's monitoring.

I suggest removing the tethering program and value your old unlimited data plan.

my .02 cents
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where do you get your knowledge oh great one?!?
I tether, infrequently, but I do tether...
My mom tethers... somewhat ferequently for her Wifi only iPad...
My brother tethers for his macbook and friends frequently in college....
My other brother has it and uses it for specific occasionas but not that much..

what im saying is.. your wrong.

No notice yet.. thanks for the input though...
 
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I disagree, been tethering and still tethering every day to my iPad and MacBook pro. I also make hotspots for friends when they may need Internet access. Been doing this pretty much since the iPhone 4 came out never heard anything.

I don't think AT&T is monitoring anything more than usage spikes. (if you averaged a half gig /mo for 6 months then suddenly started using 2 gb /mo) they will flag your account and send the notices. It would be pretty costly and time consuming just to add a $20 a month charge to a minimal number of users accounts. A small percentage of iPhone users jailbreak, an even smaller percentage tether.

This would seem more of a ploy by AT&T to get heavy data users off of the unlimited plan and onto a tethering plan so that they will be capped at 2 or 4gb /mo rather than using 15-20
 
Benji222 said:


where do you get your knowledge oh great one?!?
I tether, infrequently, but I do tether...
My mom tethers... somewhat ferequently for her Wifi only iPad...
My brother tethers for his macbook and friends frequently in college....
My other brother has it and uses it for specific occasionas but not that much..

what im saying is.. your wrong.

No notice yet.. thanks for the input though...
Click to expand...


My knowledge is based on my 15minute experience with att customer support a few hours ago. LOL

I have had tethering capabilities since the middle of last year but have not used it much. I am a busy pandora user so I dunno.
 
Although my account says "noob", I've been on the site for years, but no longer have access to prior account.

So I've been using PDANet with the supposed "Hide" feature (level 1). Just received the email (no text) about tethering. Today is also the end of month for me, with about 2.3GB of usage, and my tethering was MAYBE 200mb on an iPad2. My history is about the same as far as data usage, so there was no spike in usage either.

Point is, I hope this dispells some of the rumors about a "5gb cap", or ipad usage not counting "because it's iOS" or anything. I think it's safe to say that ATT is using a TTL sniffer or tracking IP/MAC address that are accessing data from the network. Until we know exactly what metrics are used to flag people and finding a way to mask it, te tethering bandwagon is coming to a close...
 
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angry4nus said:
Benji222 said:


where do you get your knowledge oh great one?!?
I tether, infrequently, but I do tether...
My mom tethers... somewhat ferequently for her Wifi only iPad...
My brother tethers for his macbook and friends frequently in college....
My other brother has it and uses it for specific occasionas but not that much..

what im saying is.. your wrong.

No notice yet.. thanks for the input though...
Click to expand...


My knowledge is based on my 15minute experience with att customer support a few hours ago. LOL

I have had tethering capabilities since the middle of last year but have not used it much. I am a busy pandora user so I dunno.
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And you think they know how the process works? They are just people at a call center, not the ones flagging your account.

Also would you expect AT&T to admit that they don't know who is tethering? Of course they are going to say they know if you are or aren't, that doesn't mean that they really do.

There is really no evidence saying they do know who tethers considerin heavy data users who don't tether have gotten the same messages it's much more likely that they are monitoring data spikes as said in my previous post
 
what is your usage like? what do you think you have done differently to avoid being flagged?

i'm looking at my usage history and i do have two large spikes in data usage. i'll be safe and stop tethering since there is no reverting back to unlimited data once changes are made.
 
Just got my email today :( I dont think I have a huge data spike recently, but I did just upgrade to 4.3.2 last week, and I did tether last week but did not use all that much data.
 
I've been on AT&T since feb. and got unlimited 2 weeks after joining. So far i've used 4gb the first month, and 17gb last month. I tether occasionally, mainly when a friend needs internet in the car or something. I also tethered this last week during the bad weather to get weather updates away from wifi. Nothing so far from AT&T. If I do get one i'll have my mom call in and play dumb, they'll probably believe that more than a teenage guy calling in and playing dumb.
 
Here's my interesting 3 cents worth -- I have a separate AT&T expresscard data card (5gb a month) and an Iphone (unlimited data plan). As late as a few months ago I was able to place the iPhone sim in the data card and run off that. Tried it again the other night for some light browsing. The next day I got a text message saying "An eligible data plan is required for Laptop, Tablet or MiFi devices ..." I called and they said they'd detected the iPhone sim had been used in the data card. They never noticed/detected/or cared about this before. Their network is definitely sniffing a lot more than it once did.... Add this to the mix.
 
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Benji222 said:


where do you get your knowledge oh great one?!?
I tether, infrequently, but I do tether...
My mom tethers... somewhat ferequently for her Wifi only iPad...
My brother tethers for his macbook and friends frequently in college....
My other brother has it and uses it for specific occasionas but not that much..

what im saying is.. your wrong.

No notice yet.. thanks for the input though...
Click to expand...

i thought he said sooner or later. You haven't receive a notice doesn't mean you won't.
 
angry4nus said:
If you tether at all you WILL receive a notice(email, txt and/or postage mail) sooner or later.

Data amount is not what att is monitoring. Firmware version, tethering program, iphone version or if device is jailbroken does not make a difference either. I don't know the technical explanation but att is monitoring if additional ips and/or mac addresses appear under your iphone connection.

You WILL have to give att a call to halt the automatic tethering service plan change. After you have spoken to customer support they will note your past tethering and will give another notice if more tethering occurs.

If you currently have the "unlimited" plan from back in the day then you are safe to use pandora, netflix and other traffic intensive programs. These will not trigger a tethering notice to att.

We are SOL. Tethering is no more unless someone someday comes up with a way to spoof att's monitoring.

I suggest removing the tethering program and value your old unlimited data plan.

my .02 cents
Click to expand...

Agreed.

As I mentioned in another thread, there's simply too many packet inspection based methods to detect tethering, so its highly unlikely AT&T engineering would simply use high data usage as a means to identify such practice. Not only would that *not* indicate who was tethering vs. who was not tethering (think Netflix, Sling, and the growing list of video-based apps), such an approach would kill their productivity of trying to eliminate unauthorized tethering clients, and it would also open AT&T up to needless lawsuits down the road.

Rather, what is most likely happening, is that AT&T management has decided to systematically detect tethering users, first targeting those who are on the high-end of monthly data consumption (eg. 25+ GB per), and then once they've cleared that list, move down to the next batch (eg. 10+ GB per), and so on. Kind of a "stop the heavy bleeding first" approach for their network. I would even suspect that eventually AT&T will target those who are consuming under 2GB per month who are tethering, just to be consistent in their policy of non-tethering without a proper plan.
 
headcase said:
Agreed.

As I mentioned in another thread, there's simply too many packet inspection based methods to detect tethering, so its highly unlikely AT&T engineering would simply use high data usage as a means to identify such practice. Not only would that *not* indicate who was tethering vs. who was not tethering (think Netflix, Sling, and the growing list of video-based apps), such an approach would kill their productivity of trying to eliminate unauthorized tethering clients, and it would also open AT&T up to needless lawsuits down the road.

Rather, what is most likely happening, is that AT&T management has decided to systematically detect tethering users, first targeting those who are on the high-end of monthly data consumption (eg. 25+ GB per), and then once they've cleared that list, move down to the next batch (eg. 10+ GB per), and so on. Kind of a "stop the heavy bleeding first" approach for their network. I would even suspect that eventually AT&T will target those who are consuming under 2GB per month who are tethering, just to be consistent in their policy of non-tethering without a proper plan.
Click to expand...

doesn't explain why people who don't tether have received the notice though....
 
xxBURT0Nxx said:
doesn't explain why people who don't tether have received the notice though....
Click to expand...

So far, I've only seen a couple of people claim they've received the notice and do not tether. Without trying to get into a "he said, she said" debate, but unless we have access to AT&T network traffic logs, there's no way to independently confirm the accuracy of such claims (eg. date of supposed last tethering activity).

In the end, I'd say it basically comes down to folks deciding whether they wish to "bet against the house", and continue tethering until someone industrious can adequately cloak such activity. I would hope it's as simple as modifying TTL, but who knows...
 
xxBURT0Nxx said:
doesn't explain why people who don't tether have received the notice though....
Click to expand...

what is your usage like? what do you think you have done differently to avoid being flagged?

drummr said:
I've been on AT&T since feb. and got unlimited 2 weeks after joining. So far i've used 4gb the first month, and 17gb last month. I tether occasionally, mainly when a friend needs internet in the car or something. I also tethered this last week during the bad weather to get weather updates away from wifi. Nothing so far from AT&T. If I do get one i'll have my mom call in and play dumb, they'll probably believe that more than a teenage guy calling in and playing dumb.
Click to expand...

how did you start out with unlimited data plan in 2011? i thought they discontinued offering the unlimited data plan last mid 2010?
 
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APtalent said:
If you don't reply, they'll automatically add the Tethering Plan. It's $45 from what I recall.
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Bzzzzzzt! Wrong.
 
I love how people are saying they know the truth about it after being on the phone with an ATT reps. The truth is that you dont know and your SOL if you got one... and your probably jealous/hateful now.
The rest are personal opinions, dont go around forcing your OPINION down everybody else's throats. Saying things like ~you will get one eventually~ is probably just not true..

We have also heard a bunch of different crap from low level ATT tech support saying everything from; were sorry, it was an assumption --- to yeah.. we know you tether fo sho' so dont do it again.


I think the final verdict would be if somebody got one twice.. or they followed through. I dont think this has happened yet?


My usage was fluctuating already, so maybe thats whats keeping me from getting one.. not saying thats what it is.. just an idea
 
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