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Root Wifi Tethering, has anyone "actually" been caught?

1) Palm Pre gets tethering for free. No doubt Verizon included that there to boost Palm's abysmal sales.

2) There is no 5GB limit. No. Such. Thing. If you use a lot of data, you are liable to have your usage reviewed and if you were tethering, you will be charged $0.25/MB for all the data used while tethering. It's that simple.
 
i use about 6gb a month not tethering at all and my brother uses about 9gigs streaming slacker. seems pretty easy to hit 10gigs just using your phone, soa few gigs tethering i doubt will be a problem
 
I think a lot of people are getting confused between what is fair and reasonable vs what is legal. It doesn't matter what Palm Pre users get. It doesn't matter whether you think that you download so much just with the smartphone anyway that a few GB tethering isn't a big deal.

If you don't have a tethering data plan (which is the one that has a 5 GB limit) on top of your unlimited smartphone data plan, every megabyte of data you use through tethering you can legally be charged $0.25 for. That's $250/GB.

I agree it would be very nice and seems perfectly reasonable to include tethering for free. If you are a Droid user with only a smartphone data plan you signed a contract agreeing to the $0.25/mb fee for any data used through tethering.

Verizon is a business and if it makes business sense for them to start analyzing accounts and charging people for the data they have tethered, they will do it and you will not have a legal leg to stand on to stop them.
 
stedrocklp said:
Why do they get it free and we are thrown to the wolves if we do it?
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They still only have a 5GB cap for tethering, and yes, they started to offer it because Palms weren't selling. It got so bad VZW started refusing deliveries to the warehouses :eek:
 
CRPercodani said:
A VZW tech rep (not the normal ones from the store or on the phone) said they are working on a way to sniff out packets that are being sent from PC's, even with pdanet masking them. Whether this is true or not I don't know.
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I'm sure they are. I don't think there dumb and they know about PDAnet. The thing is though if you know anything about packet sniffing then you know you get a bunch of info packed all together. Its gonna be very hard to filter just the comp usage. Reviewing high data usage on one account would be a lot easier.
 
That's what I assume they would do, I can't see them sniffing out a million or more phone's packets at once haha. They will most likely look for the highest data uasge accounts and go from there.
 
I see some people posting they used 5GB of data and they are worried about getting caught, if verizon has no way of determining whether or not you are using it for tethering, thats not a lot of data. I use over 20GB of data every month and i dont use tethering. I used the slacker radio app all day at work I never turn it off, and I use it at the gym at night, and I also use it in my car when Im driving to and from work......just some insight on how much data someone can use not tethering.
 
The 5GB really has nothing to do with our Unlimited data plans anyway. 5GB is the limit of an actual data tethering plan.
 
ml3000 said:
Well i finally got my bill and I wasnt charged.... Thank goodness... 7.6 Gb later almost all tethering...
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I'd like to see a few more examples of people like this. Please you guys, if you end up tethering a lot (5GB+), tell us whether or not you get charged on your bill! ;)
 
OMJ said:
Thats no reason to keep doing it. The more people tether like this the more chance that it will be monitored by VZW. Dont ruin it for everyone
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Agreed. Why even post about your date usage. Don't people know VZW monitors these forums.
 
I really dont know how people use so much lol. I stream Sirius through Orb and use it about 5-6 hours a day at work. So that is approx 100-120 hours a month I use it and last month I only used 1.25 GB. Though mostly I only use it to stream Howard or Bubba. I do think they less bit rate on the talk stations, so that might have something to do with it I guess.
 
bamaredwingsfan said:
One of the guys i work with has the wireless hub for his home internet service through verizon. He continually went over the 5Gig limit per month, so he decided to get his wife an daughter each a droid. They have just started tethering the past few days, so i will find out soon. He thinks he can take some load off the air card by tethering 2 home PC with the droid! I think he is headed for a big WTF when he gets his next bill LOL:D
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Well just today i asked my friend how the tethering was going, and he told me Big Red shut him down:D He told me that verizon disabled tethering on his 2 cellphones. I asked him how he knew, and he said a message popped up on his computer screen saying his tethering account has been suspended due to overly high usage. I asked him if he has got his bill yet and he said no, not yet. I would be very nervious right now if i was him;)
 
Its actually quite easy to tell what browser, os, os version, and mac address the traffic is coming from.

If this all can be done with a simple javascript code on a webserver, what makes you think the carriers can't determine these things?

Tapatalk. Samsung Moment. Yep.
 
nstallion said:
I think a lot of people are getting confused between what is fair and reasonable vs what is legal. It doesn't matter what Palm Pre users get. It doesn't matter whether you think that you download so much just with the smartphone anyway that a few GB tethering isn't a big deal.

If you don't have a tethering data plan (which is the one that has a 5 GB limit) on top of your unlimited smartphone data plan, every megabyte of data you use through tethering you can legally be charged $0.25 for. That's $250/GB.

I agree it would be very nice and seems perfectly reasonable to include tethering for free. If you are a Droid user with only a smartphone data plan you signed a contract agreeing to the $0.25/mb fee for any data used through tethering.

Verizon is a business and if it makes business sense for them to start analyzing accounts and charging people for the data they have tethered, they will do it and you will not have a legal leg to stand on to stop them.
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Really!
Not only the end of the thread, but the end of this whole stupid debate, IMO. It's their sandbox we're all playing in, and we bought tickets that have their rules clearly printed on them. You can twist or question or claim you didn't understand the meanings of them, but in the end, the service provider already knows that end user already knows that tethering is a legally profitable offense. They've defined it just enough so end users know not to do it, but have kept the parameters just vague enough to be able to open a can of legal Whoop-Ass on anyone they want. They could just wait till you rack up $5K and then say you should act a little more grateful for their generosity of offering to settle for half of it! lol

Is tethering about to be ruined for us all by irresponsible morons? I'm certain of it. A great deal of money is made by cell phone companies on the irresponsible habits of their customers by the majority of them exceeding limits. If tethering capability for our phones is offered in an official update, that means they have already analyzed everything they need to about it to make money from it. (-What, you didn't think they were watching all those times you so stealthily flew "under the radar" at 4.75 GB? lol)
Anyone who thinks a service provider has caved to the will of the masses by allowing tethering is really, really naive.
 
Slightly off topic, but I just had to add that I saw Psychokitty's avatar, then read his fairly long post, and the whole time I was reading I had this vision in my head of a bunch of tethering abusers blindfolded in a row while a gun-toting kitty mowed them down! :D
 
Probably a stupid question. But if only rooted users have tethering why would they even make a plan for droid users that includes charging for tethering. its such a small group of people so i dont get it?
 
skryer said:
out of spite i tethered my friends iphone to my droid when he didn't have reception but i did.
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Actually, in this case, I bet you could get VZW to refund the charges ;)

dfine06 said:
Probably a stupid question. But if only rooted users have tethering why would they even make a plan for droid users that includes charging for tethering. its such a small group of people so i dont get it?
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Presumably if they did make a plan that charged for tethering, they would also find a way to enable it for non-rooted users. Maybe with a Verizon-branded app, or just by re-enabling the native tethering in Froyo.
 
bamaredwingsfan said:
Well just today i asked my friend how the tethering was going, and he told me Big Red shut him down:D He told me that verizon disabled tethering on his 2 cellphones. I asked him how he knew, and he said a message popped up on his computer screen saying his tethering account has been suspended due to overly high usage. I asked him if he has got his bill yet and he said no, not yet. I would be very nervious right now if i was him;)
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So does your 'friend' have droids or other phones? The way you talked about it
his tethering account has been suspended due to overly high usage
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sounds as if 'he' had crackberries or other non-droid phones that he paid $30 a month for a tethering plan.
 
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