AT&T Cracking Down On Unauthorised Tethering

[kap]

Seacrest wrote:
[quote=kap]
Will they demand non data subscribers to subscribe to data soon?

They just effectively did that, I think.
I am on a cheap-ass grandfathered old AT&T Blue plan (pre-Cingular merger), and under the guise of telling me my "phone will no longer work" they are forcing me to change my plan and get a new phone.
A buddy just told me ATT did the same thing to him so he went with Sprint.

[rjmacs]

kap wrote:
[quote=Seacrest]
[quote=kap]
Will they demand non data subscribers to subscribe to data soon?

They just effectively did that, I think.
I am on a cheap-ass grandfathered old AT&T Blue plan (pre-Cingular merger), and under the guise of telling me my "phone will no longer work" they are forcing me to change my plan and get a new phone.
A buddy just told me ATT did the same thing to him so he went with Sprint.
This was happening to me before i switched to iPhone. There is a legitimate problem with the old SIMs no longer being supported. You should be able to get a new SIM, but it can put a cramp in keeping your phone # intact and seamless. It's much easier for ATT if you just get a new phone. To be clear: people in this predicament have phones/SIMS that are >5 years old. It's not preposterous to think that an ever-changing technology platform would require some upgrades over that period of time.

[vision63]

AT&T should sell their business to people that know how to run one.

[OWC Jamie]

Verizon ?


:devil:

[Bill in NC]

Call them up and tell them you're just using Pandora & Netflix a lot on your iPhone.

[cbelt3]

billb- you can fully expect Verizon to do the same damn thing. AT&T does not have a monopoly on Evil. Verizon is another Sith Acolyte.

[silvarios]

rjmacs wrote:
This was happening to me before i switched to iPhone. There is a legitimate problem with the old SIMs no longer being supported. You should be able to get a new SIM, but it can put a cramp in keeping your phone # intact and seamless. It's much easier for ATT if you just get a new phone. To be clear: people in this predicament have phones/SIMS that are >5 years old. It's not preposterous to think that an ever-changing technology platform would require some upgrades over that period of time.

If you loose your phone, AT&T can issue a new SIM with the same phone number. Is the old phone not compatible with the new SIM? Even if a new phone is mandates, what does getting a new phone have to do with maintaining an old pricing tier?

[wickedsteve]

DharmaDog wrote:
I don't know for sure, but I'm going to bet that AT&T does not really know who is tethering. I think they are just targeting customers that use a lot of cellular data, figuring that probably 80% of users above X GB/month are likely tethering.

byu146 wrote:
All IP packets have something called a TTL associated with them. It stands for Time To Live. Every "hop" along the network from one router to the next reduces the TTL by one. When it reaches 0, the packet is dropped. This was introduced to keep routing problems from overloading the network. If for example, by some error a packet was going around in a circular path, the TTL would eventually reach 0 and prevent a packet storm.
The thing is, ALL routing devices do this. OSes use standard TTLs. For example, let's say both your iPhone and laptop use 127 for the TTL. AT&T will receive packets from your iPhone with a TTL of 127, but since the packets from your laptop pass through your iPhone first, they arrive at AT&T with a TTL of 126. They can detect a tethered device this way.

www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/g62wv/i_woke_up_this_morning_to_this_lovely_email_from/c1l6ixe

[DharmaDog]

I'm aware of TTL. But knowing how disorganized AT&T is, I find it difficult to believe they suddenly got their sh!t together to crack this case.

Further, why would they accept any excuse from from people that claim to be huge "NetFlix and Pandora" users as the reason they are consuming large amounts of data if they have the TTL evidence to the contrary?

[wickedsteve]

DharmaDog wrote:
I'm aware of TTL. But knowing how disorganized AT&T is, I find it difficult to believe they suddenly got their sh!t together to crack this case.

Further, why would they accept any excuse from from people that claim to be huge "NetFlix and Pandora" users as the reason they are consuming large amounts of data if they have the TTL evidence to the contrary?

I don't believe they really accepted those excuses. I think AT&T reviewing TTLs is more likely.