Thread: How would the carrier know if you tether or not?
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Arjun is offline Arjun
2006-12-22 , 13:57
Posts: 242 | Thanked: 8 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ USA & BharatVarsh ( INDIA - Kerala ).
#2
Originally Posted by freeman
Well, this is my first post, as I just own the n770, but have to put it back in the shop, but will get it back soon(hopefully). I also plan on getting a data plan on my cell phone. Currently I have a Nokia 6620 w/ Cingular and no data plan. I do have some knowledge of how the internet work. But I can't seem to understand how would the carrier know if you tether your data or not. My Nokia 6620 is happened to be s60, aka symbian linux phone. So, if they just exam the packet, there is absolutely no way they would know if the data was requested from my 6620 or 770.
Can somebody tell me how this work?
From my meager knowledge of this I think the way a Carrier would know whether you are using the Phone itself or the Nokia 770 is by the way of the websites accessed. I have a Nokia 3650 Phone and a Nokia 770. Till about a few months back I could Bluetooth into the Phone using the Nokia 770 and surf the Web as I pleased. Then last month or so I found that I could not access the Internet using the Nokia 770 + Nokia 3650 any which way. I also found that T-Mobile (the Carrier I use) has a new Data Plan for $ 29.99 that would allow the Internet access. This would obviously mean that T-mobile found out that some people use their Symbian Phones together with a Handheld to access the Internet and decided to sell such service and make money instead of allowing such access freely. But this along with a Phone Plan is expensive.

I am miffed at the fact that T-Mobile stopped such access yet the charge of my plan did not decrease any which way. My logic for saying this is that, before (when I just had the phone and no Nokia 770) there were no issues. Now that they found that I access the Internet via the Nokia 770 using the phone they blocked it. So essentially they took of an option from my total Phone Service. But it is my phone time and is paid for. It is not as if T-Mobile says ohh this customer is only accessing the Internet and that too using his own Phone Plan and Time, so we have no problem.

Also the fact that using the phone and its Internet capability alone I think one can only access specific websites, normally the Carrier supported ones. When the Nokia 770 is used to access random websites in a random/ specific order, the Carrier finds this out by the activity on and of the Network.
Last edited by Arjun; 2006-12-26 at 16:58.