Confused Reddit user misleads the web
Because of a Reddit post of a January Wall Street Journal article, the internet has been buzzing for the last 12 hours about a “legal loophole” allowing iPhones on the AT&T to be tethered.
In response to AT&T customers wanting to keep their grandfathered unlimited plan which doesn’t allow for use of the wifi hotspot feature, other users noted that the iPhone can be jailbroken and tethered to get around the restriction.
Tethering shut down
Some consider it a hack, others theft, but AT&T finally shut down the ability to openly tether and last week, all users with tethered iPhones opened their tethering app to see the above picture.
A Reddit user posted “Hey iPhone users, TETHER AWAY! If AT&T switches you to a capped plan, you have the right to get it back thanks to a legal loophole” which received hundreds of up votes and a great deal of buzz on Twitter and Facebook.
Unfortunately, a “legal loophole,” it is not, rather it points to an article from January that outlines an unadvertised option AT&T is able to (but not guaranteed to) offer to consumers- threaten to go to Verizon where data is unlimited or give them unlimited data.
The ultimatum option
The ultimatum option, as we will call it, does not allow for tethering as AT&T has claimed to have clamped down, but does allow for users to possibly bully customer retention into giving users a way into an unlimited data plan. Loophole no, unlimited data plan maybe.
Charlie Pitkin via Facebook
March 21, 2011 at 4:06 am
Yet again, At&t helps me affirm my switch away. I like the way one guy on TWiT put it, “when you pay for a 4 passenger car on a toll road, does it matter how many people you actually have in the car?”, i.e, if you pay for the data, does it really matter how and if you use it?