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AT&T aggressively moving against unauthorized tethering
- StatusStalker 16y agoI'm still tethering and haven't received an email. There is always going to be a way to out smart you AT&T!
- w1ntermute 16y agoSounds like a wakeup call to anyone doing this on other providers. I haven't heard anything about this from Verizon, but it's probably time to start tunneling my tethered browsing via SSH. This is going to be one of the biggest casualties of a lack of net neutrality on wireless networks. Like TFA says, there should be no reason you can't consume the data you have purchased in any (legal) way you see fit.
- bhousel 16y agoWouldn't the overhead involved in ssh tunneling your tethered traffic just help you to hit the bandwidth cap sooner? You're certainly not hiding anything from the carrier, who can easily see that your smartphone is pulling down way more data than a normal user on their network.
- cosgroveb 16y agoI read speculation that they were detecting the tethering at a lower level so SSH tunneling may not help you. I think the idea was when a packet hits their network from a device it has a particular TTL (X), if it comes in with a TTL of X-1 then it's obvious that the user is tethering.
- w1ntermute 16y agoI'm using USB tethering (Proxoid), so I don't think the TTL issue applies to me.
- cosgroveb 16y agoUh, yes, TTL would apply to USB tethering (if that is what they are looking for). TTL is part of IPv4 (it's called hop limit in IPv6) which is a couple levels up from the physical layer (in your case USB) in the OSI model. I mean, whether you use USB, or Ethernet, or WiFi, you're still just shuffling packets around.
- w1ntermute 16y agoWell that sucks. I suppose the best thing to do is have the tethering apps not decrement the TTL, though I have no idea if any of them support that.
- cheald 16y agoAgain, it's not the tethering app that does it, it's the TCP stack. It's likely quite possible for a custom Android ROM to implement this workaround, but I would be surprised if you could accomplish that with an iPhone.
- metageek 16y agoNo, ssh tunneling would help, because the IP packets making up the ssh connection would be coming from the phone, not the laptop, so they would have their TTL set by the phone.
- cosgroveb 16y agoI assumed he meant ssh tunneling from his computer to a home network or something in order to disguise his User Agent or anything else identifying on the application layer. This makes more sense...
- tptacek 16y agoAT&T didn't sell you generic fungible data. Because you are a nerd on a nerd site, you're natively inclined to determine that any connectivity is generic connectivity, measured and priced only by $/bps. But $/bps isn't a product AT&T sells with generic iPhone plans. The reason AT&T charges you to tether probably has little to do with technology and everything to do with segmentation. They have two choices. They can raise their data rates for everybody and attrit customers to other providers (or to less lucrative featurephone packages). Or, they can find ways to charge higher rates to less price-sensitive customers. You are a person who wants to plug their computer into their phone and use it to get on the Internet from the Acela train. There are not that many of you, and you are uniformly wealthier than most other segments of AT&T customers. Finding a way to charge you for that behavior is marketing 101. If you're an entrepreneur, it's good that the rest of the world sees things AT&T's way (to wit: when you agree in a contract that you're going to use a service in way X and not in way Y, the provider is within its rights to enforce that contract). It's this force that allows you to charge money for things and thereby make a living. If you're anyone earning the anomalously high income accorded to technology professionals, you're run a slight risk of hypocrisy complaining about this. A complex web of similarly nerd-arbitrary contracts keeps the money flowing through the conduits and manifolds that eventually feed your bank account.
- sabat 16y agoAT&T didn't sell you generic fungible data. A lot of people would argue that beyond internet access, any more nuanced distinction is just profiteering. Imagine the power company telling you to turn off your computer because you only have an "Unlimited Light and Heat" power plan.
- tptacek 16y agoDo you work in the technology industry? A substantial portion of your salary is based indirectly but inexorably on profiteering, which term for "pricing what the market will bear" is not widely used among businesspeople. There are two clear reasons why the power company can't segment their market per your example. The first is that power companies are regulated utility monopolies that have to respond to state governments. The second is that they lack the technology to differentiate between power usages. Even so, if you talk to energy-intensive businesses, you'll find that there is customer segmentation in electrical power. This shouldn't surprise you, because there is arbitrarily segmented pricing in everything from hotel rooms to canned tomatoes to beer to office space to cars to computer chips.
- kgrin 16y agoExcept T-Mobile, FWIW, who doesn't charge me extra for anything (at least on my N1 - not sure if it differs by device, though I'd doubt it)
- jonpaul 16y agoI tether on iOS 4.0... but can someone explain the difference to me between the "personal hotspot" feature in the 4.3 iOS release and tethering in previous versions? Do you still have to pay the extra AT&T fee for the personal hotspot feature like you do for tethering?
- tptacek 16y agoYes, you do.
- jonpaul 16y agoBut for Verizon it's free??
- tptacek 16y agoI don't know what Verizon does (I'm at AT&T customer) but "Personal Hotspot" is simply the new term for "tethering".
- ominous_prime 16y agoYeah, "tethering" was previously usb, then bluetooth (ooh, almost forgot IR tethering). Now that you can tether with wifi, they changed the marketing term to "personal hotspot"
- metageek 16y agoOh, man. I remember tethering my Zaurus over IR on the train, trying to keep the Zaurus and the phone lined up so it wouldn't drop the connection. I think I did that just once.
- dunham 16y agoI believe Verizon is $20/month. (I didn't sign up for the tethering/hotspot.)
- molecularbutter 16y agoThis is outrageous and it's a harbinger of things to come for all internet communications, goodbye net neutrality you will pay to use data how you want. Let's geek out though, does anyone know HOW they are determining who is tethering? Is it just excess data use that is flagging your account? Are they watching packets? If you use a VPN would they not be able to detect tethering use?
- tzs 16y agoThis is not a net neutrality issue.
- sabat 16y agoOf course it's a net neutrality issue. AT&T wants to charge more for data from a tethered computer than it does for a non-tethered computer. Bits are bits: that's the point of net neutrality. If you pretend that "all bits are created equal, but some are more equal than others" (apologies to Orwell), then you're not net-neutral.
- tzs 16y agoNo, net neutrality is about not discriminating based on who you are communicating with or the meaning of the bits. For example, if AT&T had a deal to promote Bing, and as part of that blocked or limited traffic to Google, that would be a net neutrality violation (discrimination based on remote endpoint). Or if they detected and throttled VOIP traffic, that too would be a net neutrality violation (discrimination based on the meaning of the bits). They are discriminating against people who hook up unauthorized computers to their network. That's outside the scope of net neutrality.
- uxp 16y agoYou are both right. AIUI, Net Neutrality can be defined as treating every endpoint the same. My connection to Google, Yahoo and Bing should be exactly the same, as what you said. But does it really matter which device I connect to Google, Yahoo or Bing with? No. My phone is still an endpoint on the internet, as the only difference between a starting point and an ending point is the direction. You might have a point arguing that bad network users (spammers, zombies and over-consumers) should be discriminated against, but that is not a neutrality rule, since those users did something to degrade the performance of others. Blindly saying that an iPhone is not allowed on my network is exactly the same as saying no one is allowed to connect to Facebook on my network. In this case though, and especially the Reddit thread early this morning that seemed to spark this debate, users were showing consumption habits of 150GB+ per month on their 3G connection. I have no problem enforcing some restraining rules against them (like throttling over a certain number). But claiming that every packet coming from my laptop tethered to my phone should be charged at a 15% premium compared to the ones that come from my phone directly is ridiculous and is a violation of net neutrality.
- orijing 16y agoI would expect Verizon to follow AT&T in this move within short time, just like how VZ eliminated the unlimited plan very soon after launching the iPhone. It would make sense if Verizon and AT&T had these patterns of interaction (from their perspective). It sets a precedent for AT&T to make changes that are good for profits, and Verizon following suit, thus magnifying the effect. Since they are the two biggest providers of services in the US, it makes sense that they'd have an implicit agreement to collude. Although it's hard for me to disagree with their offering tiered services (It makes sense from a social-surplus standpoint with respect to monopolies and monopoly pricing), as someone else already mentioned, this is symptomatic of the lack of competition (which also, to an extent makes sense because of the natural-monopoly nature of the industry). In short, this is a result of a market failure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure) where there are a few possible solutions: 1. The government steps in and offers a competing service, at marginal cost. But who says the government can do it better, or even at parity? 2. The government auctions off a contract (Say, in terms of $/year) to a provider, and subsidizes them (at the unit level) such that marginal revenue = marginal cost. The good thing is that the final price of the auction in a competitive market (no collusion, implicit or explicit) incorporates the benefits of the stream of subsidies and monopoly profits. As a result of this, we can achieve a socially optimal (i.e. pareto efficient) outcome. The problem is that it's hard to know MC for sure. 3. The government imposes price caps slightly above marginal cost. Again, what's the marginal cost? 4. Break them up into little chunks. However, this would eliminate a lot of the benefits of natural monopolies and economies of scale. All of them have some problems of their own, not to mention headwinds against political action
- cookiecaper 16y agoI wouldn't say it's a market failure, it's more of a regulatory failure. The problem isn't that a lot of competition has resulted in no benefits for the consumer; the problem is that a lot of competition hasn't existed yet. It's a lack of a market, not a market failure. Right now the expense of complying with regulation alone is enough to make most potential competitors balk. Combine this with the fact that it takes years of legal hoop-jumping and other paperwork before you can even create a truly independent provider, and it becomes pretty hard to start a new cell network.