[Thunderbolt General] yareally:
Long ago, land line carriers for cable and dsl had tactics like this as well. They would put in their terms of service that you couldnt have your connection networked to more than one computer.

Just like how the wireless community is with workarounds, people found their own for this as well. They networked their connections through their main computer tied to the modem or a router behind NAT. When cable companies started deducing they had different MAC addresses, people got around that by cloning the main computer MAC. Some routers if you look in the firmware still have the ability to "clone mac addresses" if you were wondering why it's there.

Just like how people are either defending their rationale for tethering or being an apologist to the wireless company about "how they can't afford all the excess traffic on their poor networks, etc," people were also doing the same thing with land line carriers.

Long story short, the customers took the companies to court and the court sided with the customers and now no one thinks twice about why they're allowed to have a wifi router or wired network from their home. Some might say, "Well, we have caps on landline connections." True for some, but not everyone is capped and even so, your cap is sufficiently higher than the 2gb allowance that say AT&T expects you to live with for $25.00 a month now on a phone. A smart company will try to make their resources look scare even if they aren't just to keep prices and demand high. It just doesnt happen with bandwidth, it happens with plenty of other commodities. The other rationale is they want to cripple third parties like netflix and hulu so they can sell their own (inferior) services. At&t capped their DSL/fios connections not because their network is over-saturated (not possible, it's going through phone lines ffs not cable lines so there's no data overhead from television), but because they want to push their crappy tv service on customers instead of them using netflix and other (cheaper) sources.

Wired/wireless carriers are scared of becoming nothing but a "dumb pipe" that just carries data to the end user and thus marginalizing their profits that the shareholders demand. At&t sees this and so does Verizon, which is why they have/will have caps, throttle users, argue against free tethering, and oppose network neutrality. It's not just wireless though, google around for articles on comcast, layer 3 and netflix when it comes to network neutrality and playing fair.

Eventually the wireless controversy will go the same way as landlines. The average customer has not been annoyed or screwed enough in general to care yet. Those on forums like XDA and such are just a small minority. When joe sixpack finally has something useful on his phone that he can use that sucks up tons of bandwidth (like for example, netflix), he might start to want to complain more. It generally takes the masses getting angry to get anything done (that or large corporate third parties like Netflix taking the wireless carriers to court as well over being crippled). At&t wireless users on android until this month could not download from anywhere other than the android market for apps unless they rooted or sideloaded. Some At&t users might think it was a victory for them, but most likely, it was Amazon strong arming AT&T into giving into allowing third party application sources.