T-Mobile’s $14.99/month for Tethering — Are You Kidding Me?

One of the (few) things I liked about my Nexus One was the tethering and portable hotspot feature that just worked after the Froyo update was rolled out. I almost never use the tethering, but love the ability to turn the phone into a hotspot. This is something I only use a few times a month, mostly so my son can access the Internet on his iPod touch while we’re on road trips, and occasionally to give my wife and I Internet access when we’re staying at hotels (sad that a portable hotspot on a cell phone still beat most hotel’s overpriced wifi options).

Anyway, T-Mobile wants to start charging customers for this capability. According to a press release from late October, in order to keep using this feature,

Customers must add the $14.99 Tethering/Wi-Fi add-on feature.

. . . and . . .

The data accumulated while tethering will count towards customers’ 5GB data speed reduction threshold limit.

Okay, that’s where you really start to piss me off as a customer. Currently I have two phones through T-Mobile, my G2 and my daughter’s Blackberry. In total, I pay $180/month with unlimited data on both.

Now frankly I didn’t mind all that much when T-Mobile announced recently that it would set a 5gb/month cap on the unlimited and then begin throttling speed down after that limit was hit. Not ideal, but much better than most cell phone providers have done.

On the other side, though, it is absurd that T-Mobile wants to charge me $14.99/month above and beyond what I’m already paying if I want to use 200mb of that 5gb each month on my laptop. Why? I’m staying well beneath the 5gb/month quota so I’m not negatively impacting their network with excessive bandwidth usage. If they were offering me another 5gb/month of bandwidth in that $14.99/month deal, I’d understand, but as it is now the proposed charge is ludicrous.

This just seems like T-Mobile saying, “we can charge you $14.99/month for this feature, so we’re going to.”

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