Like probably most other iPhone users I consider O2’s to tethering charges more than a little greedy but when my T-Mobile broadband failed earlier today I thought I’d give O2 a try so I could at least compare the two.
The resulting conversation didn’t go well, first I was told it’s impossible to add tethering ‘same day’ and I’d have to wait until my next bill was produced. Seems a pretty odd way to cash in on a heavily promoted ’new’ service.
What really inspired this post though was the next part of the response – I was told that unless the user switches tethering off after use any data downloaded by the iPhone even when used as a phone would continue to come out of the tethering allowance, resulting in bills for any overage.
This is pretty remarkable given O2’s assertions over the past few days that they’re able to tell when the handset is being used for unapproved tethering. Surely, if one takes that claim at face value, this means O2’s billing systems should in turn be able to tell the difference and not charge for data used for normal iPhone operation?
there are three ways of finding if the user is using tethering
1. Apple could include routine to mark TCP/IP packets from tethered devices – e.g. change MAC identification for such packets etc. I’m very interested if they did it, because it would be very clever, but it is very hard to find out if this is the case
2. They could have upper ISO OSI layers filters and so they can find out if you are downloading something, what is of no use on iPhone
3. They could do some statistical analysis and simply find out the users with high trafic etc.
But one thing is to find out if user is using tethering and the second is to charge him – O2 cannot charge of something, what you have not ordered, even if you are using it (unless you got some strange and illegal contracts in UK). So the only what they could do is to stop your data tariff.
I think (and hope) that operators will use their power only if you are f.cker who use cheap mobile data for intensive downloading etc. Such people are big problem for mobile network, because it is shared, so if one BTS got 7,2 Mb/s capacity and you are using it at maximum rate, the other users will have very limited connection.