T-Mobile Finally Getting Tough on Tethering?

1) They're all publicly owned companies. That is, they are all required by law to make money for their shareholders.

1) They're all publicly owned companies. That is, they are all required by law to make money for their shareholders.

First... it's because they need to plan for the future and raise money now to keep expanding/upgrading their data network. That costs a _boatload_ of money.

Why do you think carriers such as Verizon got out of the landline business? The margins of returns are much better from their wireless division.

If you haven't been paying attention, wireless services are a HUGE cash cow for telco without considering any additional fees like for tethering.

$30 a month per device for smart phone data is not cheap. It is actually very expensive, and that is what providers are using to build out their network. This artificial price floor that has been, conveniently adopted by almost all cell providers, means that no one should feel bad for telco. They are rolling in money.

You should mention this to Light Squared who's sole means of income was to establish Sprint's LTE network. You could point out where all of this money is that they are rolling in. Perhaps you could also call T-mobile, who's profits were down 50% from last year.

Please don't try to compare the economy of forign countries. It does not work that way.

Perhaps not Japan but how about here in good old North America, specifically Canada? Rogers, for example, does not charge extra for tethering. In fact, they encourage it because it has a habit of generating overage charges that are apparently more profitable than charging a tethering fee.

So you are willing to trade one evil for another and you think people won't still complain? I took a quick look at Rogers's data plan pricing and they appear to be a lot more expensive and are all tiered (I realize that it's the Canadian Dollar). So another way to look at it is that they allow tethering but 1) the basic plan is more expensive, 2) all plans are limited and 3) the cost of the plan actually increases upon usage.

I wonder how many $10,000 data bills they have to eat because people don't pay them.

It's windmobile.ca.

You are comparing Wind coverage to any other company? Come on... lets be honest. Wind has "coverage" in 3 small areas (3 cities in all of CA). If you are outside of these 3 cities you _PAY_ "away charges at $.20/min. You also pay $.10/25kb.

Per their website:
"
If I have a data add-on, can I tether my phone to my laptop?

If you have a data add-on and have added data tethering, you can use your phone's internet connection to get your laptop online (aka "tethering") with most WIND phones."

It appears from their website that data with tethering is seperate from a normal data plan.

We are talking about tethering.

i dont get all this nonsense these wireless companies are doing with restricting tethering.
when i tether my phone as a wifi hotspot, its so i can browse the web, do my work and chat with people on my laptop, not for downloading large files.
sure there are users who use tethering for bandwidth intensive applications and im sure thats the reason behind all of this but lets stick to the caps and/or throttling for cases like that.
i just cant understand why in the USA, throttling, caps and overages have to apply, not just for wireless, but for everything, when these providers are obtaining this bandwidth for wholesale, the cost scales have to be so unbalanced between the consumer and the provider.
Japan does not have all of this nonsense.

Do you honestly think that major shareholders care about a couple hundred dollar phone bill?

Can you explain how?

before you know it they will be charging us a fee for charging us a fee.