An internal document was leaked either today or yesterday from ATT. It specifies the portion of the contract that tethering violates. It also lays out how CSRs should/can handle customers.C-Kwik wrote: Huh? ATT requires people to pay for tethering? Perhaps I'm missing some prior context, but I'm not aware of any company requiring anyone to pay for tethering to own a phone and use it on their network. I don't have a contract from either carrier to look at to confirm this, but anecdotally, if ATT required tethering with their phones, they wouldn't be telling iphone users to pay for tethering or stop doing it. And from a quick search, some tech news sites reported that T-Mobile did indicate that tethering was not allowed per their terms and conditions. Again, perhaps I'm misunderstanding the context of the statement so feel free to clarify if that's the case.
This is very interesting. I pay for a service and I'm expected not to fully use that service?
You sell me 5GB of data and then complain about it an penalize me for actually using that data?
The whole concept is absurd. From what you're saying it would seem that there is no limit/threshold that tethering would be acceptable.
Something interesting, on ATT if you move to the tethering plan you can not stay on your grandfathered unlimited plan. You are dropped down to the 4GB plan.
A few of the home ISPs have set a 250GB cap. Should I be charged more money if I have ten computers in the house compared to someone that has only one computer?
Treat wireless the same as a landline is perfectly acceptable. Cable is the best comparison as the bandwidth is allocated to an area/group of users. You can pay for different levels of service from the ISPs. Each increase in level increasing the D/U speeds. If you purchase the max connection, usually a 40/10, you allocated up to 40/10Mbps. There is no speed guarantee. If everyone is using UseNet to download files and max out their connections constantly the speed will decrease as the network is saturated. Same as with the wireless network. There are no penalties for doing this. There is no increased fee for having 10 computers instead of just 1. Yes, 10 computers in a house have more potential to use more bandwidth then that 1 computer household. There is still no penalty. Why?
*note* the reason I chose cable is that the bandwidth is aggregated to a section of houses/customers. Not just an individual. This parallels the wireless spectrum, but with much higher network capacities.
Now lets take a look at what the wireless carriers are doing. They are constantly increasing the download/upload speeds that their network is capable of. Yet they are not increasing the load capacity of the network. This is all done for marketing hype. Oh, my e-penor is bigger then theirs! A 20Mbps WWAN connection is useless if you're not allowed to utilize it to its full potential. Furthermore, having that speed available is simply tempting users to tether their devices to this connection. As has been stated many times in this thread, handsets don't use large chunks of data. So why the hell would we need a 20Mbps connection!
The focus of the carriers is in the wrong place. Well, it's the right place from a marketing/profit perspective... Instead of trying to show off and say that their network allows you to download at 11ventyMbps they need to focus on upgrading their networks capacity. With the spectrums being used for things like LTE they could decrease the upper limit of download speeds to each device. Instead of allowing 20Mbps per handset they could allow 2Mbps. Boom! Instant increase in handset(rather then saying data lets calculate in handsets!) capacity. If one person downloads at 20Mbps that's be the same as 10 people downloading at 2Mbps.
A balance needs to be found. Currently the carriers are not striving to reach that balance. They are trying to attract customers. This is coming at the cost of network reliability and capacity.
