07-11-2011, 05:05 PM
rz wrote:
I don't understand... isn't the point of a MyWi to tether to it? How does AT&T know, or why should they care?
They care because they want you to pay $20/month for the ability and the privilege to tether. MyWi bypasses that income. And so they look for more or less continual data usage on the phone and if they surmise you're tethering this way, send you a note about adding the official tether option.
But at this point it's an educated bluff. They don't apparently have a way to know that data coming into the phone isn't being consumed by the phone. Perhaps if they noticed that ports used or data types normally worthless to the phone were being consumed, they'd suspect you were tethering by implication. But unless and until iOS actively reports back to the carrier what's happening, the carrier wouldn't know for sure. Even then, a user could install an additional app to obfuscate that, no doubt.
All of this is of course crap, and has parallels to content viewing on "approved" devices. Basic Hulu not being available built into TVs for example. You could watch Hulu all day long on your computer, or watch it all day long directly from a TV if it were available---either way it wouldn't matter to Hulu, but to the content creators a TV is a magical box of viewing convenience that must be carefully monetized and controlled.