Google seems to go all out to promote android, others be dammed: First with their free satnav (making TomTom lose 20% of it's value), now with tethering.
While I love tethering, I wonder what carriers will think of it. I can imagine this backfiring, with carriers less likely to push tethering-supported devices that eat into their (more profitable) laptop packages.
I still don't understand, what is the problem with tethering.
Where I live, the operators don't care about it. Even the lowest-end phones support it. As far as I remember, I never owned a phone that didn't support it (the oldest as a modem on serial port and CSD/GPRS speeds).
So what is so special on some smartphones, that it causes problems? As far as I remember, 3G phones (both feature and smart) always supported tethering, whether over USB (CDC ACM, CDC ECM, RNDIS) or Bluetooth (DUN or PAN).
My guess is that an unlimited plan on your phone doesn't actually pull a lot of data if you just use it as a phone. It's a different story after you tether it to your laptop and start downloading entire movies or throwing a 10GB directory into dropbox. Maybe I'm missing something, but that's my guess.
Most unlimited data plans I've seen have some sort of throttling clause, basically stating that if you use more than X GB of bandwidth in a month they reserve the right throttle you to Y Kb/s for the remainder of that month.
I think actually that's just T-Mobile. They definitely seem to be the most progressive of the US carriers.
Most carriers either cut off your data entirely for the rest of the month, threaten to terminate your contract, or charge you an outrageous overage fee.
They sell differently priced plans for datacards and phones? That would make sense.
Here they sell just data plans. Whether you use dedicated modem or have the plan on your voice SIM, it is your problem. Some operators allow to share the data quota among multiple SIMs, so you can have both. Because the price is same, so there is nothing to cannibalize.
Currently yes, I pay flat fee per month, however, my plan is speed-limited.
For the high-speed plans, there is always stated data limit. If you want to transfer more bits, like movies or sync big folder mentioned above, it is cheaper to use fixed connection (unlimited at commonly achievable 40 Mbps FTTH is about the same price as 20 GB over theoretical 14.4 Mpbs HSDPA; about 24 EUR/mo, both by the same provider [Orange]).
But still, if you want just few GBs per month, do not need fixed connection, why would be the provider bothered by tethering? Browsing and mailing is still more comfortable with laptop, than phone.
I think it's more about promoting ubiquitous access to the internet more than promoting android. Promoting android is a means to and end not the end itself.
