Vodafone Ireland are launching the iPhone in a few days time.
However the “standard” iPhone plans won’t offer all the features that they could do. If you want “tethering” you’re expected to pay more.
Most smart phones have bluetooth, so if you’re stuck somewhere with a dodgy internet connection you can use your phone as a modem. For some stupid reason the Apple iPhone does not have this feature enabled by default, so you have to get it turned on by carriers.
Vodafone Ireland want to charge an extra €10 / month for this!! (The cost varies depending on the plan type)
So even if you have a data plan already ie. you’re already paying them for bandwidth, they want an extra €10 / month to turn on an option.
How can Vodafone justify this??
According to Vodafone Ireland’s Twitter account:
“Tethering on an iphone works differently to that on other handsets, so this service isn’t included in your package.”
Wow! That’s the best non-answer I’ve seen this week!
One of the other mobile operators came out with this clanger:
“iPhone tethering costs more as it uses a lot more data than traditional browsing on your iPhone itself”
Logic? Zero
Welcome to rip off Ireland!
O2 have started doing this now too – if you’re on an old plan you can use tethering for free, but on a new one you have to pay extra for tethering.
Funnily I was looking at getting an iPhone yesterday with vodafone and was wondering what the flip .. 😀 .. I have to pay that for … I presume you can hack your iphone though that could end up expensive in itself if you do it wrong.
“different Tethering”
Never heard such bollix in all my life.
Normal Vodafone data customers connect to the APN hs.vodafone.ie
iPhone customers will use the same APN
data is data
Katherine
So some users get it for free and others pay?
Odd.
Michele
James
I’m not sure if you can hack around it or not without completely hacking the phone
Michele
Pat
Data is data. I honestly don’t understand how anyone can justify charging differently for something they already offer *sigh*
Michele
Isn’t there still a bit of a HUGE difference in the costing between the iphone and data in Ireland and in the UK as well .. same company hugely different pricing models?
While I understand the size of the market in the UK would hugely reduce costs in some ways its still a bit .. erm … mad!
Yep some get it for free but that plan is no longer available to new users so they have to pay!
The only reason I can see is that it would likely eat into their mobile broadband / dongle business. Pure greed.
I googled this “different” tethering a while back, and some suggest that tethering uses a different data session to the regular phone use. So you could potentially have 2 data sessions open (your phone checking mail, and your laptop tethering). If that is true, then it justifies some additional cost (because of the impact you’re having on the network).
3G is not designed for the masses, and having many iPhone users using up 2 data slots (or multiple slots) is going to do a lot more damage than merely half the bandwidth available to others in the cell sector. This cost might go some way to control that (otherwise uncontrollable) contention?
It still doesn’t answer 3 obvious questions:
1) Why does it cost so much more / not using a model more suited towards occasional tethering / use the prepaid “broadband” model of a 1-day pass. Most tethering is (or should be at least) occasional use.
2) Why doesn’t the iPhone at least have a carrier option to combine the iPhone’s internal data session with the tethering session (like every other phone on the planet)
3) Why do older 1GB o2 customers get this for free (yet newer 3GB customers don’t).
That is, of course, assuming that the multiple data session titbit is, in fact, true. It just makes this a little less crazy.
Actually, they’re right – iPhones which are tethered use a lot more data than iPhones which aren’t, because you tend to generate a lot more traffic over the 3G network using a laptop.
This is happening for the same reason that AT&T are choking on their open access plans, the same reason that we have “midband” in Ireland, and the same reason that folks are going about talking about the “mobile data apocalypse” — the 3G network (and the LTE network as well) are not set up for data. An iPhone can generate more data traffic than an entire exchange used to generate five years ago. The SS7 network just isn’t built for that and backhaul is expensive as a result – so if you have a smartphone, most operators are barely breaking even on you right now, and if you have a tethered smartphone with their all-you-can-eat flat rates, they’re losing money on your account.
Hence the measures to try to prevent uptake.
Yep; O2 are doing exactly the same thing for anyone foolish enough to switch to the new plans.
am .. but isn’t using more data as such coming out of your bandwidth limit for the month ? or am I wrong ?
Yikes, I knew that O2 were doing that but Voda as well?
Just vote with your wallet and buy a different phone. I got my Nokia 5800 (on Meteor) tethered to my Macbook last week, browsed the net a bit, checked Twitter and IRC updated all reasonably fast.
I checked my online bill later that day and the data used was covered by my plan. None of this “extra charges for tethering” crap! 🙂
It’s a rip off
iPhone tethering vs Nokia as modem
There is no bandwidth difference
Feel ripped off by vodafone considering I have a data bundle
and they want more because they can limit the functions on my phone
and charge more to re-enable them.
Enable my modem on Iphone (tethering) please without charge !
Bandwidth in the sense of total amount of data transferred (i.e. not the literal sense), is not the issue. 3G operators don’t care if it’s 1MB or 20MB you use.
Bandwidth in the literal sense (the amount of data transferred in a given instance) is the issue. I can’t find any evidence, but plenty of suggestions that iPhone tethering uses a separate data session to the phones internal data connection and to MMS. So, in theory, you could potentially have 3 data session open (tethering, mail polling, receiving MMS). That’s not how Nokia (and most phones) operate, and hence the additional cost.
Because of the nature of 3G, those 2 sessions (where other phones use 1) cost the operator (and other users of a given cell sector) a lot more than twice the cost of 1 session. Why? Because, the bandwidth is not simply halved (as with your home wired broadband, say), it’s more than halved, and chances are it will cause cell shrinkage (disconnecting cell fringe data users and, more importantly, cell fringe voice users).
So, if iPhone uses a separate data session for tethering, then there is a very real and significant cost to the operator, which would justify the presence of the tethering charge. The amount is well marked up, as with all mobile/cellular data, but that’s a different debate.
If commentary suggesting the iPhone does use that additional session is incorrect, then this is profiteering of the highest order.
In the absence of credible source to confirm/deny, I’ll bow out of the speculation. I just wanted to highlight that potential justification of cost.
Just noticing as well a rather hefty price difference on the E72 as well on the Max Roam site … vrs Vodafone (prepay)
http://www.maxroam.com/Shop/Product/List.aspx
€199 there on maxroam … vrs Vodafone’s €319.99 ??? I mean WTF ?
So here’s the deal…
3G data is packet-switched. I won’t go into the details of what that means, but 1 data connection using 10MB is the same as 10 data connections using 1MB. No difference to the operator’s bandwidth whatsoever. So that argument is a non-starter.
Next, there is no difference between iPhone tethering and using Nokia/SE/whatever as a modem, EXCEPT THAT Apple have included a feature in the iPhone that allows their partner operators to lock your tethering usage to a specific APN. This allows the operator to bill separately for mobile browsing and tethering usage. And because they can, they do.
This is the case even if you get an officially unlocked iPhone from another network and bring it to Vodafone – they can still tie you to their specific APNs because they’re partners. And so they do.
Finally, the “fears” of thousands of users eating up bandwidth with tethering is ridiculous – (a) as has been pointed out, this facility has existed for ages on other phones, the difference being that the operators couldn’t control it with those phones – didn’t seem to bother them then though and (b) I spoke to a Vodafone customer service rep about how crazy it was that I would be charged through the nose if I join vodafone, just on the basis that my phone is an iPhone and I want to tether. He said I was the first person who had mentioned tethering to him. Hardly going to bring the network to its knees at that rate!
It’s not completely ridiculous. Check the usage graphs for MNO data offload – they do a hockey stick impression once the iPhone was released. And every single operator out there is looking down the barrel of this. Data traffic cost $16 billion in 2009 in the US alone, and this year data traffic passed out voice traffic in bandwidth requirements for the first time in history, and there’s absolutely no sign of it slowing down. It’s increasing geometrically at the moment. LTE and 4G will increase the demands on data offload at the base stations, not alleviate the problem, and as platforms like the iPad, Android and Maemo and others gain market share in the high end phone market, the amount of data generated will rise. And since the MNOs didn’t pump the same cash into SS7 infrastructure that was pumped into the standard TCP/IP infrastructure during the dotCom boom a few years back, there’s no excess capacity to handle this.
Basicly, every MNO out there is defecating building materials at this prospect right now, and every telecoms equipment provider is having a joyous reaction of equal, if opposite, magnitude – Cisco is playing up the Data Apocolypse story like it was funding the founder’s retirement, Ericsson has already started pushing its LTE tech all over the place, and lots of large players are watching the problem like hawks.
Yes, there’s no difference between an iPhone and an N900 doing tethering… except that it’s a lot easier on an iPhone and there are a *lot* more iPhones than any other high-end smartphone. If 80-90% of your problem comes from one single source, you treat that one single source first to buy time. That’s what’s happening here.
“1 data connection using 10MB is the same as 10 data connections using 1MB. No difference to the operator’s bandwidth whatsoever”.
Bandwidth is not the issue, as such. It’s the fact that iPhone tethering users (if what you say, and I’ve read elsewhere, is correct) are using 2 sessions instead of 1. The effect of that is cell shrinkage and, more importantly, the potential for dropped/missed calls (and voice subsidises data, so it’s very important!). Stick an iPhone tetherer near the edge of a cell sector, and he can have a quite a drastic impact on data+voice for EVERYONE else in that cell. That, IMO, is the issue.
Now, of course, if non-partner networks allow iPhone tethering over the same data session as the iPhone’s background data one, then this forced APN is of their own making; and is probably best described as profiteering! What I’ve read suggests otherwise, but maybe you (Paul) know better?
It’s the number of sessions and their proximity to the base station that is the real cost, not the bandwidth.
Mark, I accept the point that tethering on iPhone is easier than other handsets, but I don’t accept that that’s what’s caused the huge increase in data usage, not by a long shot.
Note that tethering only became possible on iPhone less than a year ago, and still isn’t available on, for example, AT&T in the US. If the data usage graphs hockey-sticked on the release of iPhone, it was nothing to do with tethering/modem usage. It’s purely down to the sudden increase in usability of mobile data-enabled devices, with iPhone leading the way.
cgarvey, Vodafone specifically tie tethering to their “office” APN purely because it is seen as a “chargeable service” and the way to ensure they can achieve this is to assign it a specific APN. They could just as easily have used the same APN for mobile browsing and tethering if it suited their purposes. Search their forums using some of the keywords from this paragraph for confirmation.
The iPhone tariffs do not include bundle access to the “office” APN (they cover only the “live” APN) and therefore you have to buy an add-on for tethering.
Now it turns out my previous post was not entirely correct. Firstly, while you’re locked into the “office” APN for tethering, you actually *can* change the APN for everything else using e.g. Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility (not for the faint-hearted). But, it turns out, this doesn’t help much.
Secondly, there is a data add-on available (only relevant if you’re locked into a standard iPhone tariff, e.g. if you ported an iPhone to vodafone like I did) that covers both “live” and “office” APNs. This add-on, if available to you, should be sufficient to cover both mobile browsing and tethering. You just have to figure out how to get the right one added to your account.