AT&T Stitching Up Jailbroken iPhone Tethering
Loophole closed?
Prior to iOS 4.3, the only way for an iPhone to share its 3G connection as a Wi-Fi hotspot was to jailbreak it. Now that it's officially supported in the Apple software, though, U.S. carriers are including the personal hotspot charge in the tethering premium.
While users can still jailbreak and install an after market app such as MyWi to enable Wi-Fi tethering without the need for carrier permission, AT&T is wising up to this practice and has sent out notices to such users.
AT&T has been sending out texts and emails to users whom it believes to be tethering their phones through unauthorized means. It notifies users that AT&T will automatically subscribe them to a new data plan, which could spell big trouble for those still clutching at their grandfathered unlimited data plans.
Below is the email that many users have been seeing in their inbox:
Dear XXXXXXXX,
We've noticed your service plan may need updating.
Many AT&T customers use their smartphones as a broadband connection for other devices, like laptops, netbooks or other smartphones– a practice commonly known as tethering. Tethering can be an efficient way for our customers to enjoy the benefits of AT&T's mobile broadband network and use more than one device to stay in touch with important people and information. To take advantage of this feature, we require that in addition to a data plan, you also have a tethering plan.
Our records show that you use this capability, but are not subscribed to our tethering plan.
If you would like to continue tethering, please log into
your account online at www.wireless.att.com, or call us
at 1-888-860-6789 Monday - Friday, 7 a.m. - 9 p.m. CST
or Saturday, 8 a.m. - 7 p.m. CST, by March 27, 2011
to sign up for DataPro 4GB for Smartphone Tethering.
Here are details on the plan:
DataPro 4GB for Smartphone Tethering
• $45 per month
(this gives you 4GB in total, combining both your smartphone data plan for $25 and the tethering feature, $20)
• $10 per each additional GB thereafter, added automatically as needed
• Mobile Hotspot capabilities are included for compatible Smartphones
If we don't hear from you, we'll plan to automatically enroll you into DataPro 4GB after March 27, 2011. The new plan – whether you sign up on your own or we automatically enroll you – will replace your current smartphone data plan, including if you are on an unlimited data plan.
If you discontinue tethering, no changes to your current plan will be required.
It's easy to track your usage throughout the month so there are no bill surprises. For example, we send you free text messages when you reach 65, 90, and 100 percent of your plan's threshold. If you would like to monitor your account more closely, go to www.att.com/dataplans to learn about other ways to track your data usage.
As a reminder, our smartphone data plans also include unlimited usage of Wi-Fi at no additional charge. AT&T smartphone customers can use Wi-Fi at home or on-the-go at any one of our more than 23,000 U.S. hotspots already included in your data plan.
Thank you for bringing your account up to date. We appreciate the opportunity to continue to serve your mobile broadband needs.
Sincerely,
AT&T
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And just how do they know someone is tethering? By usage? ---- I think we just all need to move to Verizon.
F-You AT&T! Your service is now overpriced for sure, I'll pass on the dropped calls.
Thank God, I don't live in the States.
Is that even legal? I know the companies put into your contract that they have the option of changing something but to add something else to the contract without your permission? Also why does it matter if your tethering, its all the data your paying to use anyways.... what a rip
I wish that they were broken up by Anti Trust legislation so they can't keep treating subscribers like they are nothing more than live stock at a paltry farm.
As mentioned on other forums if you did get this notice, and they do change your plan, that gives you a release from any contract you have with them. You could speak to a customer rep about this very point and inform them of your possible intentions and they'll likely back down (refuse to speak to the fact of whether you are actually tethering, admit nothing). So X is the amount of letters they send out, Y is the amount of people who will bark back telling AT&T they won't stand for that. X - Y = Z, the amount of people mixed between ponying up or ceasing their non-contract tethering. AT&T is banking on Z.
But they are. Anyone who is more than that wouldn't be using AT&T in the first place.
As mentioned on other forums if you did get this notice, and they do change your plan, that gives you a release from any contract you have with them. You could speak to a customer rep about this very point and inform them of your possible intentions and they'll likely back down (refuse to speak to the fact of whether you are actually tethering, admit nothing). So X is the amount of letters they send out, Y is the amount of people who will bark back telling AT&T they won't stand for that. X - Y = Z, the amount of people mixed between ponying up or ceasing their non-contract tethering. AT&T is banking on Z.
How is them charging you for tethering you're not paying for releasing you from your contract? It's pretty obvious to see data usage trends. All they have to say it you're violated their ToS then they can do anything they want to you and charge you anything they want. Sure you can leave then they'll slap you with the ETF. You won't win against any of them,
I'm with Verizon and I probably pay more than with some other carriers but I never get a dropped call, their LTE service is FAR faster than anyone elses and I get a 20% discount through my company. You want tethering? then pay for it.
being charged for tethering should be illegal. It would be like your ISP charging you an extra fee for every PC and other network devices you connect to your home network.
If I got a E-Mail like this, I would send back a Snail Mail letter to the Cancellations Department smelling rather like poo!
if your on an unlimited data plan then they have to offer you unlimited data and just becasue you are conecting a laptop to it dosnt chang the fact your phone is the one sending and recieving the data, in other words you could take them to court over this
This is BS no matter how you look at it. I totally agree with teknomedic. This is just clipping the ticket because they can when they are already making money from data caps. And I thought Telecom were A-holes here in NZ!
You are all so naive about the whole experience. There is a clause in EVERY US carrier's contracts stating if they even have SUSPICION that you are abusing your plan, or "attempting to game the system" then you can be charged any and all applicable fees without breaking the contract, including forcing an additional plan. I do agree that tethering should be free if you are on a limited data plan, but for the legacy planholders abusing tethering, something has to give. There is a reason the network is unable to sustain the data throughput.
You are all so naive about the whole experience. There is a clause in EVERY US carrier's contracts stating if they even have SUSPICION that you are abusing your plan, or "attempting to game the system" then you can be charged any and all applicable fees without breaking the contract, including forcing an additional plan. I do agree that tethering should be free if you are on a limited data plan, but for the legacy planholders abusing tethering, something has to give. There is a reason the network is unable to sustain the data throughput.
Yes, it's much cheaper to punish users rather than increasing their bandwidth and making their service more reliable. If taking them to a court doesn't warrant Justice then there must be something very wrong with the word Law...
i wonder how this applies to me. I'm under contract from alltel and have a 40 dollar unlimited data plan through at&t. I don't plan on tethering, but may swap the sim into the laptop.
Sheesh! You shouldn't need to pay to tether in the first place, I think.
I'm glad I don't live in the US. I'm in Canada, and on Rogers, (as far as I know) I can tether my phone all I want (mind you I only have 1GB of data/month....)
I agree, that, it should be illegal. Unless they have physical proof that you are tethering, they shouldn't be allowed to charge you any more for the services you are paying for. With that being said, they can't prove that you are tethering at all, considering you could be away from your home for an extended period of time, and you could be downloading a new app, or browsing the web, or watching videos from, say, YouTube a lot more than usual, which would mean increased bandwidth usage. Is this saying they are going to assume you are tethering because you're using more data than usual?
With all of that being said, it's kinda pathetic the US government, nor the FCC are doing anything about it.
How is them charging you for tethering you're not paying for releasing you from your contract? It's pretty obvious to see data usage trends. All they have to say it you're violated their ToS then they can do anything they want to you and charge you anything they want. Sure you can leave then they'll slap you with the ETF. You won't win against any of them, I'm with Verizon and I probably pay more than with some other carriers but I never get a dropped call, their LTE service is FAR faster than anyone elses and I get a 20% discount through my company. You want tethering? then pay for it.
You sound like such a greedy corporate dirt bag. Much like the ones on Wall Street who ran, and continue to run this country into the ground by betting against our very own stocks.
Paying $30+ a month for cell phone data should MORE THAN EASILY warrant you to tether. It's just easier to hook a phone up to a laptop, than use the phone to do such tasks. I could still get much of the same stuff done, It'd just take me slightly longer. Either or, I'm still using the bandwidth, so why do you give a crap that I'm using my laptop? Because, you'd like me to pay extra, or better yet, buy a wireless card and fork on another $50 a month.
I swear, by 2015 (if it already hasn't happened), everyone will sell their souls to the devil, just for some measly amount of money. Everything is money, money money. Grubbing, grubbing, grubbing. Can't even go to a damn park anymore without paying some annual $40 fee.
This tethering clause is such a huge dick move. It doesn't affect their network AT ALL if you tether, you still got your 2GB or so cap. It does absolutely nothing to their infrastructure, doesn't cause them bandwidth trouble, nothing. They just want to charge you more for having provided you with NOTHING more than they already are.
Can you say Breach of Contract? I know my attorney can!
I'm really surprised that ATT still has customers when they do things like this. I sure wouldn't stay with them.
i'm sort of expecting/hoping to get one of these letters; even though I don't tether my iphone, I use probably 6-10 gb/month on my unlimited plan and I would love to see them try to accuse me of tethering solely based on usage. What a joke.
I am on he $30 jailbroken-refuse-to-update-from-3.12-tethering-mywi plan myself. If this goes away, so does AT&T. Hello Boost or Wamart.
I don't give a flying fukk about data usage trends and whatnot. I am paying for unlimited, period. If they want to force me to access my bandwidth via a baby iPhone touchscreen vs my laptop, then they are the tyrants. Fukk them.
All these @55h0l3 companies want to fukk their users for "tehtering", yet they believe in no unlimited "all-you-can-eat", yet they want to market the perception to trick the sheeple.
If they contrinue to try and oppress me, then fukk them, cold turkey time. Time to resort to amish ways or such. I cut out cable tv and have missed nothing but life. Maybe time to cut out more tech crap, or at least find better ways to stick it to the man and make the sheeple jealous.
And all you AT&T douchbags posting in here, keep your troll post where they belong, up where browns come out for the superbowl.
So does that mean if I'm off contract, I could upgrade to a new Iphone by renewing my unlimited plan, tether, receive a notice, have my plan switch over. File a breach of contract, have a new phone for a discounted price w/o contract and go to some other carrier with GSM or sell my phone for a profit?
sounds kind of dirty, but if att is going through with this crap, then I say fukk em away
@off-topic
Can't bestofmedia sue these spammers or use their servers for exploit testing and eventually wipe mobo BIOS by accident?^^
The only way they can tell for sure its tethered data going across or not is to examine the TTL on each packet. A tethered device will be 1 less than it should be.
I doubt att is that smart and am pretty sure that they just figure there is no way any one can go beyond 5GB a month without tethering.
I've setup a custom stream @ 1024Kbps just to see.. will be streaming it to a captivate for a month with no tethering option enabled.. see what if anything they have to say.
However, if any one is getting nervous about this, the easiest way to screw att right back is to install a proxy server of some variety on your jail broken iTrash or rooted Android.
No TTL decrease, no proof.
Hmm...
Screw over DSL users, Screw over iPhone users.
Batting 1000 so far AT&T. About a month ago I as actually weak enough to consider giving AT&T DSL a shot. I am so glad I didn't. Staying with Time Warner and upgrading to Wide Band was by far the better choice.
Why can't companies think like "Lets corner the market and give our customers what they want" instead of "let try and figure out how to fukk out customers since they are the only ones stupid enought to go with us"
I'm not sure if anyone posted this response so I'll just go ahead....
You don't have to worry about them suspecting you of tethering to slap on the tethering add-on because in the header information of every web page request there is always information of the explorer version that you are using (firefox, opera, chrome, etc.) so anything thats not mobile phone browser based can easily be flagged and recognized as tethering; Plus by utilizing simple networking inspection capabilities or deep packet inspection which has been implemented in most infrastructures they can determine if the program which is accessing the internet is a mobile or pc/mac platform related so if you get a SMS or letter about the tethering know that there is a 90%+ chance that you have been caught tethering.... so stop cheating the system!
But screw them for charging a extra fee for something which is cheaper and/or free for just about everywhere else the the world.... EVEN FOR THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES!!!!!!!!
So we will continue to cheat them to prove that as long as they are assholes we will screw them with a mighty fist
Oh and to anyone out there reading this can I suggest a application that sits on the WiFi hot-spot program and translates the header information to resemble that of a cell phone browser in real-time? (although this might change the page type formatting)
Sorry for and grammar and/or spelling mistakes
Whatever happened to "customer service"?
Wish I could travel back in time to the 50's.