AT&T cops to Jesus Phone-as-modem app Why was NetShare - the app that turns the Jesus Phone into a modem - yanked from the Apple App Store? AT&T and Apple have tethering app plans of their own. During an on-stage interview at a conference in San Francisco yesterday, AT&T CEO Ralph De La Vega said the mega telco is working with Steve Jobs to deliver an official …
Is this like the 'Internet Sharing' app that comes as standard on Windows Mobile? Where you just touch the icon on the screen and your phone is a HSDPS modem?
Muhaha! Hahahahaha!
The iPhone gets more and more like an iJoke every day.
Aww come on, its the great and wonderful Messiah phone which will lead us to shininess...his greatness the almighty Jobsy proclaimed it as such.
But about the story...what a bunch of robbing bastards. Let’s steal someone else’s useful application and copy it for our own. Got to love how "innovation" works!
Somehow I don't really understand why one should be paying extra for tethering if one has flat data anyway. As if it wasn't ridiculous enough that the iPhone could not be tethered in the first place. But I guess if you allowed that, people would also want proper Bluetooth support and a ton of other mundane stuff.
Haven't you noticed that the Reg writers like to flog a meme to death, then call a taxidermist to mount it so they can keep flogging it? Jesus phone, freetard and others were amusing at first, but are just fucking annoying now. It's as if some of the writers only get a new idea to flog so rarely they feel they have to re-use the limited pool they do have.
Luckily they have managed to score a few good writers out there, so we can quickly skip over the annoying bits. I just wish they put the blogger^H^H^H^H^H^H sorry, journalists name beside the item title as sort of a contents warning.
AT&T apparently cares about tethering on 3G. Thankfully, they have all but ignored this on the EDGE network, which is fast enough for me to get things done using a six year-old unlimited Internet plan.
Paris, for tethering at speeds fast enough to get the job done.
AT&T offer "unlimited" internet on the iPhone. This does not mean that every user can saturate their 3G link 24hrs/day 365days/yr. If that happened, AT&T would have to either charge (much) more for their unlimited plan, or they'd go bankrupt. Instead, AT&T have figured out the typical usage patterns for a user on the iPhone (no Flash, streaming video is limited to YouTube, no Bittorrent downloads, no online gaming sessions, no big downloads) and priced their unlimited plan accordingly. Obviously some users will use more, and some will use less (or none) - that's the whole point of a flat-rate "unlimited" price plan.
As soon as you use your iPhone as a PC modem, all these assumptions are wrong. People who do that are likely to use much more data. So it's reasonable for AT&T to charge them more. And the only way they can do that, is by having "tethering" being off by default, and making it hard to switch on without paying. And to do that, they prohibit "tethering" applications other than their own, which will presumably check you've paid first. This all seems quite reasonable.
(Note: I don't know exactly what AT&T are charging; it may be that specific price plans are too expensive just because they can. What I'm defending is the principle of charging more for tethering).
It's all about failure to plan - again - on at&t's part. And here's the proof - well, to me it's proof...
Back in 2004 I bought a Sierra AirCard 860 and Cingular's "3G" wireless service. In St. Louis, at the Cingular store in the Cingular HQ building. Cingular promised HSDPA service with the 860; however, at their headquarters all you could get was EDGE. Period. And that's ALL you could get unless you were in San Francisco, parts of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and a couple of other "major markets".
Until the iPhone 3G was released, that is. Within 2 weeks of the 3G release, suddenly there was HSDPA service in all these other locations that were "dead" days prior. Funny how that worked.
Now that the iPhone 3G has been out a while, these same HSDPA areas are showing major suckage as far as network performance. It appears that the iPhone is saturating the at&t 3G network. Oh, yes, I can get full 3G speeds - at 3am. Forget about getting it during business hours though.
So tethering, while available "standard" from every other carrier on just about any phone (even my Sprint Instinct (which I call the "vending machine phone" because every "fun" feature is available as an extra cost subscription) tethers instantly out of the box) is NOT an option on the one phone that is sucking up all the 3G bandwidth already. It's probably a backhaul issue: I'm sure that the software upgrade for 3G was easy, but to have enough backhaul to handle it requires a real investment.
So, it's back to why did they do this? First of all, Apple has at&t b0ned with the iPhone. Everybody wants one because it's cool, but at&t gets nothing from the device sale, and worse yet, it is stuck with infrastructure costs to support the iPhone 3G.
Now in Europe, where 3G is the rule rather than the exception in the GSM market, this isn't an issue. However, if Apple releases a phone with tethering enabled in Europe, it will instantly get back to America, and at&t is still screwed. So at&t has them delay the application as long as it can so it can backfill the backhaul (or whatever) to make it worth while.
Finally, remember, what the carrier wants you to do is BUY SERVICES, not applications, from THEM! So expect at&t to address this with a new "unlimited" plan offer at US$80-90/mo for iPhones that will allow tethering, hoping that the price will keep all but the few business customers that "need" tethering out of the market until at&t does something to improve the network.
Me, I'll stick to Sprint. Yeah, they suck too, but at least my data is consistent and coverage blows at&t out of the water in nearly every market. And even the "vending machine" phone works as stated out of the box - and it's useful for making voice calls, too!
More to the point can all the saddos who come on to accuse the iPhone owners of being saddos take a long hard look at themselves? So someone buys a phone you don't like, get over it, really is your life that sad and shallow that you need to continue to hunt down and comment on every article like a bunch of performing monkeys?
Reg throws you a banana in the form of an iPhone article and you all perform on cue.
Its a PHONE. Can't believe so many folk have such a big chip on their shoulders about it. Its sad. Really really sad.
Firstly, please stop calling it the JesusPhone. It wasn't funny then and it isn't funny now. Is Cade still bitter over not getting invited to the launch?
Next: Netshare was hardly an innovative idea. Practically everyone had thought of it, but they assumed it'd get canned as being in violation of T&Cs and put their efforts elsewhere.
I would love tethering, but not enough that I'd pay a higher tariff for it.
Just for all of those people who are getting upset at the repeated use of the term "Jesus Phone".
Now I dont posess a Jesus phone, nor do I want one. Nor do I have an issue with the term 'Jesus Phone'. Nor am I going to cease to call that company's mobile offering a 'Jesus Phone'.
if you're religious, and this offends you, I suggest you GET SOME EDUCATION, and stop being religious. it is the Opiate of the Masses, don't you know. Theres also a proportional inverse square law that says that the more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to believe in God. This does of course mean that if you believe in God, you are likely to be thick, and you'll probably fail to understand the contents of this comment.
Tux, cause he's at least as good as Jesus.
The reason the nullriver app was pulled (which admittedly bummed me out) was it was an app that would explicity violate the AT&T terms of service on the iPhone contract. If you bought an iPhone then you probably viewed the ToS and balanced it's negative points with the positive alternative of owning a great phone. (Sorry, but the iPhone is a great phone, not perfect, but hands down better than anything else i've ever owned.)
AC above was right. You all started acting like performing monkeys as soon as the Reg threw you an anti-iPhone banana. Now cue the "fanboi" chants from the monkeys. . . . I have this mental picture of you all throwing feces at the mere mention of Apple or iPhone. . .
OK then, perhaps the phrase "Jesus Phone" is a tad too offensive. Maybe we should call it the Fuck Phone instead, since when normal people see the Jesus Phone groupies walking around, we think "you fucking poser". And when the Jesus Phone freaks see us they think "Fuck you luser, you know you wish you had one".
See, that's a much more apt name than either "Jesus Phone" or "iPhone".
I'm with B on this one. And tethering is banned by O2 in the UK too, so the Netshare app would have explicitly broken the UK t&cs just like the ATT ones in the US.
I really don't understand why it's such an issue - if you want tethering why buy an iPhone when it's perfectly clear it doesn't do it? Buy something else FFS.
Same goes for the by now rather tedious carping about the App Store and Apple's control over what gets into it. If you don't like it, buy something else. It's not like there aren't thousands of other phones to choose from.
WRT the name thing, personally I couldn't care less.
What I don't understand is what all the knee-jerk hatred is about from people who claim they don't want one: the iPhone doesn't meet your needs, so what? Buy something else (catch the refrain here?). Why are you so upset that the iPhone even exists?
For me, the original iPhone was way too expensive and restricted. When the 3G came out, suddenly it was a much more viable proposition. Having reviewed what it did and didn't do, I decided that what it didn't do I could live without and that I liked what it did because it did it very well. In the past I've had PalmOS Treos and a Symbian/UIQ handset and on the whole prefer my iPhone. Oddly, I can do that without feeling the need to hurl abuse at every other handset on sale or people who choose something else.
Time to grow up, people.
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