AT&T to Clamp Down on Data Leechers?

The tech-savvy among us have been tethering our laptops through data enabled phones to AT&T's (formerly Cingular) data network for years. The concept of tethering is simple, attach your phone to your laptop via Bluetooth or direct connection, and make a connection to the provider's data network so you can browse the web and send e-mail with your laptop from anywhere. AT&T allows this practice on their top-tier data plans (starting at $59.99 per month), but users with smarts have been able to tether with unlimited data packages as low as $19.99 for years without any problems or additional charges.

Cellular providers have been getting wise to the practice for some time now, and have slowly been crippling phones to prevent users from dialing in without permission and upgrading their networks to catch data leechers tethering their laptops at lower packages. Crippling a phone typically means disabling the DUN (dial-up networking) Bluetooth profile that allows a PC to use the phone as a data modem.

My new 8525 (with the latest software/firmware) is no exception to the rule, and when paired with a PC via Bluetooth or USB, simply creates a "Personal Area Network" connection instead of listing all the phone's services. The new pre-installed "Internet Connection Sharing" program handles dialing out and sharing the connection with the computer. Suffice to say, attempting to dial-out when you're not subscribed to a higher tier plan fails to work. I've used every trick in the book, and I can't get it to work. The phone is locked down pretty tight, but I won't admit to being much of a hacker.

For those of you tethering on lower priced plans on hardware that isn't locked down, be forewarned. I was recently in an AT&T store upgrading my data plan, and overheard a conversation between an AT&T employee and someone on the phone in regards to another customer's problem on this very topic. According to what I could gather (it's not my habit to spy, but he was talking quite loud), this month AT&T (who apparently can now tell if you're tethered to the network from a computer) will be hunting their network for data leechers.

What happens then is unclear (I only heard one side of the conversation), but odds are customers not subscribed to the appropriate data plans could be fined with additional data charges, or find their data services cut off entirely. Of course, this could have been a scare tactic to get the customer in question to upgrade to a higher data plan, but it seemed pretty genuine to me.

I don't have a problem with AT&T enforcing their data plans, but there are two things that irk me.

1. Under the "new" pricing structure, those with voice plans and 3G enabled phones pay the same price for tethering as someone who walks in a buys a mobile data card for their laptop. Why can't voice users (who no doubt give AT&T way too much money per month) get a break as an incentive to carry additional services on not just one, but perhaps many phones?

2. Why the heck is tethering even considered a feature? With full featured web browsers and e-mail clients bringing the desktop web experience to smartphones, why do we all have to pay another $20+ dollars a month just to use a bigger screen and different keyboard. I understand there's potential for those to abuse the system (like doing bittorrent and P2P over the mobile data network), but $20 bucks MORE a month? That puts it three times more expensive than my high speed DSL line. How about just twice the price? Isn't that fair?

One way or another, watch your cell bills. They may be sucking $60 a month out of me for data, but you could end up paying a lot more on per KB charges for tethering on an unsupported plan. Let's face it, there may be no such thing as a free lunch anymore.

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