They were when I joined as a customer around ~2012. But in more recent years they make weird distinctions between tethered and non-tethered. My SO's phone has T-Mo's version of Android, and enabling tethering causes a visible phone-home interstitial. My phone is unlocked/has vanilla Android, so it doesn't.
Our billing, IMO, is very not up-front about what our limits on tethered/not are. Generally, it hasn't mattered. Whatever our limits are, we're not hitting them.
And it's annoying AF; there is no reason for a carrier to give a crap about tethered/not. Limit my bandwidth, cap the amount I can send, sure — I completely understand not wanting a customer dragging down the network —, but what does it matter what device generated the bits?
> what does it matter what device generated the bits?
Most of the packages they sell are based not on the cost of your specific consumption (which is way more complex than peak bandwidth or total transfer), but the cost of typical consumption given some restrictions (e.g. the aforementioned bandwidth or total volume cap).
If you bunch tethered and non-tethered traffic together, the average non-tethered user will have to pay more, and the average tethered user will have to pay less, than with the two usages split (assuming the same total profit).
Thus, you would lose the "cheap" non-tethering customers to competitors who do differentiate, while the expensive tethering customers would come to you.
Or, if they limited bandwidth to the actual expected behavior, like the previous comment suggested, everyone would get the service they pay for regardless of device. The only ones who don't want that are the providers who want plans to be as confusing as possible.
> And it's annoying AF; there is no reason for a carrier to give a crap about tethered/not
Put yourself in their shoes, and you'll appreciate their reasons.
I was recently force to pay for a higher plan specifically to unlock tethering, which is important to us for backup, since we're in the hills on a crappy ADSL connection.
Their reason is that it allows them to increase revenue.
They're charging for literally nothing. I get that that allows them to make more money, but charging someone for nothing generally makes that customer unhappy. That doesn't mean I should like it, but I do think most people have no idea that tethering is completely a feature of their phone; I do take things like that into account when choosing carriers. (It was one of the reasons I chose them to begin with! But alas, the deal was altered.)
If they were “literally charging for nothing” then there would be nothing to discuss and no one would pay for it.
Just because they are both packets over the network, they are different use cases and present a feature which can be charged for.
If you don’t like it, switch to a different provider. If there isn’t one that meets this need, maybe there’s a market opening. If the market is anti-competitive and exploiting that and colluding to shut down this feature, complain to the FCC. If the FCC dismisses your valid complaint for political reasons, vote out the party which put them there. If you don’t have the votes to get the people in power to care about this issue and regulate against the monopoly which is colluding to overcharge for it, then deploy a few thousand bots to sow dissent on Twitter and... no wait, don’t do that last one.
> Just because they are both packets over the network, they are different use cases and present a feature which can be charged for.
Charging people for different use case while the product is literally the same is one the most anti consumer things I can think about it, no idea why you think it's okay.
Imagine a eletricity bill that had different prices if your vacumm cleaner was being used on the living room rather than say, a bedroom, I see it as simply absurd.
Except that electric utilities absolutely charge for the same electrons at different rates based on the type of usage, differentiated residential vs. commercial vs. industrial rates, differentiated by time of day, and even charging different rates for the same electrons delivered at the same time to two neighboring residential houses depending on if the residence is heated with electric versus gas!
Our billing, IMO, is very not up-front about what our limits on tethered/not are. Generally, it hasn't mattered. Whatever our limits are, we're not hitting them.
And it's annoying AF; there is no reason for a carrier to give a crap about tethered/not. Limit my bandwidth, cap the amount I can send, sure — I completely understand not wanting a customer dragging down the network —, but what does it matter what device generated the bits?