That's a good point. It's one thing to offer "unlimited data" for a fixed price - which is about ideal for a consumer, but that doesn't exist anymore. What you get is a fixed amount of data for a fixed price. But the provider has an incentive to make you use as little as possible, to increase its profits. But if instead you get the data returned to you, or you pay a reasonable amount by the MB, then the provider has an incentive to make you use as much data as possible. That could mean giving you a much faster service for example.
Also, notice that they're not charging extra for tethering, or care how many devices you tether to. As far as they're concerned, data is data because you're paying for it.
Won't the new FCC net neutrality rules effectively prevent tethering charges when they go into effect? Specifically, since providers will no longer be allowed to do anything to interfere with tethering, any tethering fees will be completely optional to the consumer.
Some rely on the device itself to enforce it, but that's obviously fragile if you can bring your own device.
Some check the TTL of your packets when they enter the carrier's network, because tethering is at least one more hop and so even if your computer's OS and phone's OS agree on what TTL starts at, the TTL will still be different than expected for your device's platform. Obviously this can still be mitigated by adjusting your TTL, but outside of software that'll handle this for them, that's already beyond a lot of customers.
Some even take the route of only checking HTTP traffic, and detecting tethering based on User-Agent, but I think a lot have abandoned that because it doesn't catch other protocols, and is easily bypassed even on HTTP.
I was furious when I bought a Nexus 7 (first version) and found out that tethering wasn't available on the device (although there was no obvious reason it shouldn't be and rooting the device would have allowed me to enable it). Running into this on stock devices seems absurd.
> It's one thing to offer "unlimited data" for a fixed price - which is about ideal for a consumer, but that doesn't exist anymore.
Yes it does; both Sprint and T-Mobile offer it (alongside their respective non-unlimited plans). The fact that Google Fi doesn't despite using those two carriers as its "partners" is incredibly disappointing.
To Be Clear, they offer it, but T-Mobile will throttle your speeds after a certain number of megs. Sprint also used to do so, but apparently has stopped doing so due to a need to try to get folks to at least check them out.
If bandwidth is scarce there's always an incentive to go towards "pay for what you use" schemes, though.
It's like an insurance "death spiral"[1] -- if one provider provides fixed-cost internet (or wide "bands"), the customers who use the least data will subsidise those who use the most. If another provider offers them internet at the true marginal rate, they'll move there. After they've moved on, the fixed-cost internet provider has to increase its rates, rinse and repeat.
Of course, customers may prefer to be insulated in the months they use more data than usual, and moving between providers may not be free, or they may just not care at all...
That's a big "if". And even if bandwidth is indeed scarce, then that's the problem that needs to be solved by building out one's network; punishing users for using the network is not viable in the long term (especially when folks like T-Mobile, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, are able to offer both throttled and unthrottled unlimited data plans without issue on a network that's probably nowhere near as built-out as those of AT&T and Verizon).
> Of course, customers may prefer to be insulated in the months they use more data than usual
This is exactly why the low-data users in networks like T-Mobile's and Sprint's typically don't mind subsidizing the high-data users (not that they're really subsidizing a whole lot, seeing as their respective unthrottled unlimited data plans cost more than their respective throttled unlimited and capped data plans). Having an unlimited data plan (throttled or otherwise) provides the peace-of-mind that you won't ever be charged extra based on your data usage, and that's a pretty big win for a lot of customers (especially when coupled with T-Mobile's data rollover).
