
AT&T Cracking Down on Free Tethering via Jailbroken iPhones - pak
http://modmyi.com/forums/iphone-news/755094-t-cracking-down-mywi-tethering.html
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statictype
I'm always surprised that phone companies in America can get away with
charging extra for _how_ you use your mobile's internet access as opposed to
_how much_ or _what_ you use it for.

Seems like such a false boundary to segment the market on.

~~~
enko
What a land of contradictions - on the one hand you have world's best
companies like Apple and Google and on the other, these awful, badly run,
penny wise pound foolish crapfests like AT&T.

I actually just got back from a month in the US, mostly in LA, staying around
west hollywood. The phone coverage was just _bullshit_ and I'm not
exaggerating. I was constantly amazed how I'd be standing outside, on Sunset
Blvd, with 1 bar of coverage or nothing at all - I'd have to be deep in a
basement or in an obscure train tunnel to get that in Sydney. I'm amazed that
anyone can use this tethering at all, I was lucky to be able to check my
e-mail.

Just one of those crazy things ..

~~~
Estragon
That really depends on the provider. Verizon seems to have pretty
comprehensive coverage. There were some very public horror stories about their
customer service a few years ago, though, which could turn out to be a
downside.

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raganwald
Ironic that many of the folks here (myself included) are in the business of
charging extra for packets of data by building SaaS. Our goal is to
"commoditize our complements:" We want to extract all the value from the chain
and have the hardware vendor, the OS vendor, the browser vendor, and the
carriers all become commodities surviving on a tiny margin on top of their
costs and slitting each other's throats.

It seems AT&T want to charge more for packets that have more value. Or putting
it in another way, they're performing a kind of price discrimination. All
things we like to do, we just don't want them done to us :-)

~~~
vlisivka
I agree - phone companies must intercept your phone calls and your internet
traffic and charge extra money when you use it for business. Excellent
suggestion, thank you!

~~~
raganwald
Hahaha. If only you knew... In Canada at least, they charge more for a
business landline with unlimited local calls than they charge for a
residential landline with unlimited local calls.

Sounds exactly like what you suggest :-)

~~~
vlisivka
It is same in many other countries too, just because business phones are used
much more often. It also hard to reuse such phone number, which is listed in
many places: it will be "hot" for years.

Now, it is time to validate your home landline phone. Are you really doing no
business over it? ;-)

~~~
raganwald
I suggest that the cost to provide the service is either exactly the same
thanks to amortization of equipment or only marginally higher for a small
business with a single line.

Everything else is just the way they create price discrimination and exploit
the customers' perception of value, much the same way that Microsoft have
sixty-three jillion versions of Windows.

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m3koval
It's a shame that they are finally cracking down on MyWii and the other jail
broken tethering applications. Those applications, at least for me, helped to
make the iPhone usable while AT&T dragged their feet on enabling proper
tethering for several years. Now that Verizon is finally putting pressure on
their (lack of) business model, we get stuck with an overpriced official
solution instead.

Hopefully Verizon won't pull a similar move: they seem to be largely ignoring
the unofficial tethering solutions for Android phones.

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stanleydrew
How do we suspect AT&T are able to determine when a device is being used to
tether?

~~~
pak
One reddit user suspects that they are looking for TTL's on packets that do
not match what iOS uses. I would love for somebody more knowledgeable about
TCP/IP on HN to evaluate the likelihood of this...

[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/g62wv/i_woke_up_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/g62wv/i_woke_up_this_morning_to_this_lovely_email_from/c1l6ixe)

If this is the case, user agent spoofing will _not_ work, and it would be
quite a bit of hackery to trick iOS' IP stack into spoofing TTL's for packets
from tethered devices.

~~~
signa11
hmm, apart from ttl, you can use other tcp fields e.g. windows, tcp-options,
packet-length etc. then, from a captured trace run passive os fingerprinting
to find out with reasonable certainty the device generating the traffic.

these can/may be manipulated via ip-tables, but then you still have a huge
data-volume to account for...

~~~
drdaeman
Can iPhone just route all your traffic through some encrypted VPN? I've heard
there's a port of OpenVPN for iOS — that should be sufficient.

At least you'll be sure telco guys are not inspecting your packets by any
means, be it "teethering detection", blocking some kind of traffic, or
something more malicious, like profiling your Google searches. (Timing
analysis may still apply.)

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cellularmitosis
I wonder if they can also detect proxies (e.g.,
<http://code.google.com/p/iphone-socks-proxy/> )

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InclinedPlane
Bleh. I wish the system wasn't so broken. A straight up metered usage billing
system would be fine, as long as the pricing was fair (which for some reason
no company can get it in their head to try). With that sort of system there's
then no reason to charge extra or to try to inhibit tethering.

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mx12
The interesting part of the email was where they said they would enroll you
automatically into the DataPro plan. Can they really change your contract
without your permission? Would this be grounds of canceling your contract for
free? I know that when the iPhone first came out, I was on Sprint, and people
would watch for when they would change their contracts and you were allowed to
cancel your contract free of charge.

~~~
martey
This is covered in section 1.3 of AT&T's Wireless Customer Agreement:
[http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-
service/legal/index.j...](http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-
service/legal/index.jsp?q_termsKey=wirelessCustomerAgreement&q_termsName=Wireless+Customer+Agreement&subSection=canAttChangeMyTermsRates&q_subTitle=Can%20AT%26T%20Change%20My%20Terms%20And%20Rates%3F)

Basically, being able to get out of your contract without paying an ETF is
only possible if they change the price of services to which you subscribe.
Since tethering would not be a part of the data plans of the affected iPhone
users, this would not apply.

~~~
tseabrooks
Also, after being enrolled you'd be able to call and/or log in to your account
and simply have the tethering option removed without invoking the ETF...

~~~
URSpider94
... but by then, you'd be forever bumped off the unlimited data plan.

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sylvinus
T-Mobile ([http://forum.xda-
developers.com/showthread.php?t=845532&...](http://forum.xda-
developers.com/showthread.php?t=845532&mode=linear)) and Orange/SFR in France
(though it never happened to me yet) have been sending the same type of
messages after User Agent detection...

User Agent spoofing should be added to MyWi/PDANet to avoid this!

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grishick
Got tired of AT&T's BS with iPhone plans, bought a Samsung Captivate, flashed
it with Phoenix ROM and now have free tethering.

