Salvatore Iovene

This is really silly. And by silly, I mean even sil­lier than unlim­ited data plans capped at 5GB. Mr and Mrs Ver­i­zon have appar­ently decided that teth­er­ing your Android phone should cost you money.

Let me remind you what teth­er­ing means: your phone will cre­ate an ad-hoc WiFi net­work, and will share its 3G con­nec­tion with all the devices con­nected to that net­work. A typ­i­cal use-case might be pay­ing for a 3G con­nec­tion from your Android phone, and then con­nect­ing other phones, com­put­ers, tablets or what­ever to the Inter­net, shar­ing the same connection.

Pre­sum­ably, though, your con­nec­tion has a max­i­mum speed, and also a monthly data cap, so this means that whether you enjoy that con­nec­tion from one or from ten devices, the cost of oper­a­tion for Ver­i­zon will be exactly the same. Why are they charg­ing for this, then? Because they think they can, obvi­ously. To give you the impres­sion that they are indeed giv­ing you some­thing more, buy­ing teth­er­ing will actu­ally bump your unlim­ited 5GB con­nec­tion to some unlim­ited 10GB, which is dou­ble the amount of unlim­ited! Jokes apart, it looks to me as they’re sell­ing you some­thing you don’t want, masked as some­thing you want but should be free.

This is even more fool­ish than unlim­ited data plans capped at 5GB, because I see how “unlim­ited” is a mar­ket­ing word. Most peo­ple have no idea of how much 5GB is, and if that’ll be enough for them. But unlim­ited… that’s a dif­fer­ent deal, isn’t it? It sounds so much bet­ter. Again, most peo­ple will never encounter the cap, because the same peo­ple that don’t know what 5GB are, are unlikely to use them in a month, from their mobile device.

So you see, I kind of see the point of play­ing with words with “unlim­ited”, even though it’s not really fair. But charg­ing for teth­er­ing? I call that steal­ing; charg­ing the users more, when they’re really get­ting the same, and it’s cost­ing the oper­a­tor the same.