“Here’s a bit of cheery news from the Web 2.0 Summit: AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph De La Vega just told interviewer Michael Arrington that the company is working with Apple to let the iPhone serve as a tethered wireless modem for laptops soon. And he says it’ll be available ‘soon,'” Harry McCracken reports for Technologizer.
“Even if AT&T wants more money for a tethering plan–and I’m assuming it will charge something like $50 or $60 a month–I think a lot of people will sign up,” McCracken opines.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re on board as soon as it’s offered (although, we’d prefer it to be less than $60 more per month as we’re already paying AT&T for our iPhone service). NetShare works (and it costs us nothing extra for service), but we expect a less convoluted solution from Apple and AT&T. Verizon Wireless is about to lose multiple $60/mo. EVDO accounts from us!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “sperryj” for the heads up.]
I would prefer they put netshare back in the app store
Yes please O2 in England.
Jailbreak it and get PDANet. Very easy to use and works fine.
An extra $50-$60? Yikes. For that I would just as soon have the flexibility of a separate device (card) for the same price each month.
Maybe a $10-$15 add on with a decent cap and I’m in.
Yeah, at $10-15 I’d bite. But given that I’m already paying $160 a month for my flippin’ cell phone bill after taxes and whatever fees are tacked on, I just can’t do it. PDAnet it is.
Um…thanks, but I have a feeling it will come attached with usage fees based on megabytes,etc.
$30 likely, $20 if we’re lucky. Just look at how much they charge already for other tethering plans.
$60/mth is outrageous!
$10/mth is more than enough considering we are already paying $30/mth for unlimited data to the iPhone.
Most people don’t use that much bandwidth in tether mode.
We’re already paying more for a “data” plan. They shouldn’t charge anything more for an occasional tether. 3G is not that fast.
PdaNet, hands down.
Coming soon? Hell I have NetShare today.
AT&T’s greed is unlimited and very prominent. Therefore, they’ll charge for this. Depending on the level of that greed, it might be less ($15-20), or more $40-60). If the level of greed is lower, and the charge is an additional $15 to the existing $30 data plan (plus minimum $40 voice, plus optional $5 text), unfortunately there will be many who will bite the bullet and sign up.
Realistically, though, AT&T isn’t selling users anything. The level of service is hardly going to change for them. Keep in mind, they aren’t selling tethering to Nokia crap-phone users who never use WAP browsers. IPhone users surf the web, check e-Mails and stocks, send and receive pictures, extensively. Their data usage hardly differs from that of a laptop user, especially road warrior.
The $30 data plan for iPhone is already higher than the original EDGE plan. There should be no reason for AT&T to prohibit tethering for free on iPhone. In the end, how many of those iPhone users are really going to be tethering their laptops anyway? One in 100 at most. And even those do it fairly rarely. Personally, I could fall into that group, but my usage would average no more than a few hours per year.
Again, this is clearly about greed and unless they make it some $5 per month or free, they’ll get plenty of negative press and very few buyers.
I’ll go up to $5, but I’m not traveling on the road that much and have internet just about everywhere.
Might be wise if ATT just adds a very efficient app for tethering at no cost to build up the customer base faster. It would take away some of the competition’s customers and also protect them when their exclusive deal is finished.
The amount they charge will probably depend heavily on the expected usage. Most of the commenters here sound like they’d use the tethering only occasionally for road-warrior type stuff.
But I’m guessing that AT&T are concerned that some folks will get the bright idea of ditching their land-line internet entirely, and go tethered for *all* their home internet needs.
I pay approximately $40/month for land-line internet access – not sure if that’s average or not. But if they add tethering for less than that, how many people would be tempted to roll all their phone and internet access into just their wireless account, and ditch the land-line stuff entirely?
@Gabriel
Great idea! That’s what I’ll do. I live on the road so it’s not any different then what I do now.
I hate to praise the Telekom in germany but here you can get a second sim-card for your iphone plan to put in your notebook for a one time fee, no other additional costs.
Gabriel,
Well, if iPhone could provide what Verizon’s FiOS gives me for my $40 per month (20Mbps down, 5Mbps up), I’d be just as tempted to ditch it. Somehow, I doubt that would be the case anytime soon.
That said, fibre optic has only been an option since recently. Ordinary cable (or ADSL) doesn’t provide more than 2Mbps down and up to 400kbps upstream, which isn’t all that much faster than 3G’s theoretical ceiling.
Obviously, having a do-it-yourself web server for my family QuickTime streaming (home video) server would be a bit difficult to implement through iPhone tethering. Not to mention the 24/7 availability of internet on all computers in my home.
Still, there are many people who only have one computer at home, oftentimes a notebook (MB/MBP), and they don’t go online at the spur of the moment. For those, tethering might push them over the fence and get them to cancel their home broadband. How big is that number? Perhaps not the majority of iPhone owners who would consider tethering.
Is this guy’s name for real? I mean… Harry McCracken? This is a joke, right? LOL
“3G is not that fast.”
Verizon’s solution is pretty fast (typically 0.4 to 1 megabits actual throughput in good coverage areas, sub dial up speed elsewhere) and is a viable replacement for a dial up or slow DSL line.
AT&T;’s 3G aircards have never worked quite so well.
But I think way more than 1 in a 100 people would use this as a fixed Internet replacement. After all with other mobile phones you just plug in the USB cable perform some minor configuration and start surfing. Aircards make it even easier.
Almost all light Internet users would see little practical difference between an entry level DSL solution and the Verizon one. Hopefully AT&T;can match the Verizon level of performance, coverage and reliability sometime soon.
And since I already pay AT&T;for Unlimited data, why should I owe them another cent to actually USE unlimited data?