Jonathon Bolster

web developer, programmer, geek

Well that's annoying - O2 and tethering

Like the rest of the world, I now know about the iPhone 3GS. My housemate held off getting an iPhone 3G because he expected something new and better would be released. Everyone expected something.

I wasn’t too bothered because I knew that MMS and tethering would be enabled in the iPhone 3.0 update - so I went ahead and got myself a 24 month iPhone contract with O2 back in April.

I still doesn’t bother me about the upgrade. My iPhone does what I want and that’s fine enough for me. Battery life is suitable for my needs and, although the digital compass is a cool idea, I don’t really mind not having it.

What does bother me is this: Internet Tethering on O2. O2 are charging an absolute fortune to allow me to tether to my iPhone. Stupid, seeing as my current contract allows unlimited data and wifi via The Cloud and Openzone (which, through this I can only see The Cloud).

I probably should know, but I dont, and I’m not sure how they would differentiate against tethering and using my iPhone. Granted, if I started downloading gigabytes of data, some questions could be asked. But for general use - would they be monitoring it? How about if everything was just tunnelled via SSH?

So yes, it will be interesting to see what I can do when I upgrade without needing O2’s permission.

As for MMS messages (yeay! they’re available now), I’m happy to hear that it will come from the text allowance. All that’s needed is to text to a special number on O2 and it get’s set up.

Thankfully, it doesn’t require a rip-off bolt-on to work…