iPhone 4 Beta Shows AT&T Tethering

An anonymous reader found news that will strike fear into the hearts of every 3G user in NYC. "Apple released iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 4 on Tuesday evening and it wasn't long before developers found the strongest evidence yet that tethering for US-based iPhone customers may happen sooner than later."

What is the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the point to tether on such a crappy network? It is often difficult to place a simple call with AT&T in NYC...

Re:For a price of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you live in New York, where 5GB is the most you can possibly ever pull down in a month due to network issues and speeds. That makes it unlimited! Who needs thottling or limits, when you can just overload your network and overcharge your customers!

Re:What is the point?

[imamac]

Indeed. AT&T coverage has actually been very good in the places I have lived in the US. In fact, in my current city, it has the best coverage of all the providers.

Re:Why?

[jo_ham]

Talk to AT&T about that - in the rest of the world, the iPhone has tethering as a basic non-jailbreak feature. The lack of tethering on the iPhone is the US is *entirely* AT&T's limitation, which is strange since they allow it on other phones on their network (of course, those phones are not as popular).

I didn't have to hack my iPhone to get tethering.

Re:For a price of course

[elrous0]

AT&T are the jedi masters of "later," it seems. "Later we're going to offer better customer service," "Later we're going to offer tethering (at a high price)," "Later we won't drop your calls so much." I finally ended my landline DSL from them after I heard my third year of "Later we're going to offer 6mbps in your area."

Re:For a price of course

[bhamlin]

... my point was the Android at least doesn't require the tethering fee ...

The Android OS doesn't. Your carrier usually does. AT&T only "allows" tethering on their system if you pay for it. If they catch you doing it they'll just add it to your account and backbill you for how long they think you've been doing it. Verizon is the same way (with their Blackberries, anyway).

Re:For a price of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you live in New York, where 5GB is the most you can possibly ever pull down in a month due to network issues and speeds. That makes it unlimited! Who needs thottling or limits, when you can just overload your network and overcharge your customers!

WTF uses over 5GB a month on their phone?

Seriously, has this EVER been an issue for anyone here? I'm asking because that's a shit-load of data coming across a phone.

Are you downloading ISOs or something? Via your phone? WTF for?

Look, I get the idea that its false advertising, unlimited damned sure should mean unlimited, but damn. 5GB? I don't know anyone who comes even remotely close to using that much per month on their iphone.

You're right, no one would ever, say, want to listen to Pandora for 3 hours a day (30 days/month * 3 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 1 MB/minute = 5400MB > 5GB) or worse, get the same amount of music off YouTube. Seriously, 5GB is not that much data.

Re:And for only a small $40 a month charge

[Fahrvergnuugen]

No idea why this was marked insightful. The OS has nothing to do with tethering, it's the carrier. The iPhone OS has officially supported tethering since 3.0, it's just that AT&T hasn't allowed it because they're afraid it will bring their fragile network to its knees.

If you use an Android phone to tether with AT&T or Verizon with an "unlimited" data plan, you are breaking their rules and stand to be charged extra for using the tethering feature.