Can you tether an iPhone on T-Mobile if you use a prepaid plan like the $30 unlimited? My parents barely use the computer and are paying $40 a month for Internet. They are on a regular prepaid plan with a dumb phone so I was thinking of giving them my 4S, cancelling their Internet, and signing up for a prepaid data plan.
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Tethering iPhone with T-Mobile $30 5GB plan.
- Thread starter Kendo
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If you jailbreak, yes you can tether. If you don't jailbreak, adding official tethering is an additional $15 per month. If you go over 5GB, T-Mobile throttles you to a point where even opening Google's homepage takes forever. I remember getting ~0.05 Mbps throttled. That's practically 56K/GPRS speed.
I've been tethering. Some people say there's some limit of 100 mb, but I've gone well, well over that and had no charges extra. 30 dollars a month. Nothing more.
Yeah - TMo might as well just say 5gb limit on the data.
The throttling is so extreme that once over 5gb it literally doesn't work. When I was on this plan and went over 5gb a couple times, I couldn't even get Google.com to load.
Yes you can. But, on that $30 prepaid plan, T-Mobile will charge an additional $15 for tethering (prorated to where you are in the billing cycle when you activate the service).
I don't need tethering, except when traveling. So, it does come in handy to have that option available.
For mobile, I never use up the full data allotment. But, at home, I can't imagine 5 GB going very far. And once you use up that 5GB, then T-Mobile will throttle you down to near dial-up speeds.
Their Simple Choice plans include tethering up to your data cap (on the $80 unlimited plan, you're still limited to 5 GB of tethering).
I don't need tethering, except when traveling. So, it does come in handy to have that option available.
For mobile, I never use up the full data allotment. But, at home, I can't imagine 5 GB going very far. And once you use up that 5GB, then T-Mobile will throttle you down to near dial-up speeds.
Their Simple Choice plans include tethering up to your data cap (on the $80 unlimited plan, you're still limited to 5 GB of tethering).
No, no, no they don't. They do not charge $15. This is what they say, but I am on this plan and pay $30 every month. No more, no less. I'd show you a screenshot but, as I put in that other thread... I'm out a phone.
They did require it on my iPhone 5c (iOS 7.1). Personal Hotspot shows up but I couldn't enable it unless I sign up for the tethering add-on.
Yes they do, and yes they have.
I'm on the T-Mobile $30 prepaid plan, and have activated tethering on the plan three different times. Each time, the charge was prorated from the $15 monthly rate and then deactivated at the end of the billing cycle. Unless they changed this recently, tethering is only included with T-Mobile's Simple Choice plans, not their prepaid plans.
UPDATE:
Okay, I just checked. The Mobile Hotspot is actually active on my phone! Must be a recent change, because I last activated tethering on my phone two months ago. And at the end of the billing cycle, it was deactivated. Unlike with past tethering deactivations, the option on my settings never went away.
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That's certainly nice if that's the case. Last time I used it was a couple of months ago, too. Hopefully this isn't just a glitch.
Right; it works. I can't explain why, but I and a couple family members have been using it successfully for weeks.
My understanding, and t-mobile may have changed this, is that the first 100MB tethering are free, but if you want more than that, it is $15/mo.
Has this changed?
Not in my experience. I couldn't enable personal hotspot at all unless I signed up for the tethering feature.
Seems like it has which is a good thing for subscribers.
If this is true T-mobile is my hero! Best mobile plan in the US by leaps and bounds.
When I was in Northern Europe last month I bought a prepaid sim that was unlimited everything for 30 days for EIGHT EUROS. I really didn't believe it at first but I HAMMERED that SIM card for data as hard as I could and it never ran out. I thought I maybe was being scammed by the kiosk clerk who sold it to me but it was real. 3G only though, but OOKLA I think showed 5Mb download speeds. Hopefully we get deals like that over here soon.
The T-Mobile app still has a usage statistic "Mobile Hotspot Usage 0/100MB" but it doesn't budge. I guess hotspot is free - for now. I wonder if this has anything to do with the issue where their system was incorrectly recording some iOS apps' data usage as being hotspot use and then cutting off data after 100MB? I reported the issue here, called T-Mobile multiple times reporting the bug, and then finally wrote the CEO a handwritten letter describing the problem. Maybe this is a quick fix but only temporary?