Which AT&T data plans are compatible?

[ian douglas]

Ken Restivo wrote:
> Is there a specific limit? How do they *know* you are tethering? What are the overage fees and where are they detailed?


 From what I've read, they watch your traffic for things like user agent 
strings (if they see an HTTP header specifying that you're using 
Firefox, it's a sure thing you're tethering since Firefox doesn't have a 
mobile browser yet), or that they watch for traffic levels that exceed 
your phone's capacity. For example, if you surf and browse more than a 
few GB of traffic (ie: torrent downloads) chances are good that you're 
tethering since your phone will only natively hold about 200MB of 
content plus whatever your SD card will hold.

As for "overage fees", it's whatever they charge you based on your 
current plan. For example if you don't HAVE a data plan, they'll hit you 
with pretty heavy fees. Even at 0.01/kb on the MediaNet plan, they 
expect all of your content will come through their MediaNet browser. 
That's $10 per 1 MB of data over their limit, which frankly isn't hard 
to do these days.

Their unlimited data plan used to be $20/month but they raised it to $30 
for the new iPhone. Tethering adds even more because they expect that 
you'll be downloading much more data than users who don't tether.

-id