[Captivate General] thekurrgan:
Why wireless carriers arent (yet) ISPs

My .02 worth:

I've been reading through this thread and there are a lot of good, valid, and in some cases interesting points of view.

Heres mine, that anyone may dismiss argue with or call stupid at their will..

Point 1. Att getting pissy bout un-authorized tethering:

I call bull****. First, to examine every TTL of the packet coming across a network while possible, is not practical. They have a reasonable amount of load flowing through their system and to examine each packet for a ttl.... seems asinine.

That said, even if they are... so what.. Proving it beyond the TTL argument is going to be tough, and who wants to take some one to court over it.. Will they call if you go over 5GB? Maybe.. either throw the letter away or hang up. The end.

Point 2: Why AT&T Wireless is NOT an ISP and shouldnt be thought of as such:

The original design spec of the currently deployed technology was never intended to be used as a primary source of data transmission for a larger platform than a telephone or what was conceptualized in the late 90's early 2000's as a smart phone. Is this a flaw? No.. it was just one evolution.

3G Data networks are designed to bring enhanced content to a phone for the purpose of productive mobility or mild amusement. They are not designed for downloading ISO's off MSDN / mirrors.kernel.org..

The bandwidth cap is actually a fiscal / marketing ploy (Believe it or not, offering a cheaper plan IS attractive for most people, as to buy an iPhone meant a 70 dollar bill at a minimum, which was enough to push some people away..)

Fiscally, it assigns value to a commodity known as bandwidth, which is available on a per customer basis and what not, with overages counted.. this gives them something to show ill technologically advised board members / stock holders as to WHY they are spending these billions on their network infrastructure.

What is also hard for most everyone to understand is the fact that while in todays ever increasing speed limits of cable / dsl and even fixed wireless, a paltry 3.5Mbit over a wireless medium seems mundane, easy, or to some people even lazy since they can get 150 or 300Mbit over their home wireless.

The hard part to understand is that while you may have 5 bars of 3G service, there are a hell of a lot more factors to consider on a cell site...

There is only 20mhz of so per carrier of usable spectrum for use in the 850 band, some times less in certain areas.. 60 in the 1900 band. The key part to understand is the origins of cellular billing... Time ON AIR, aka MINUTES. At the end of the day, the cellular site is only concerned with how long your phone occupies a time slot. Going to the very beginning with AMPS, when 1 persons phone call ate up an entire subsector and 5mhz of spectrum, all the way to today when one persons phone call eats up 1 timeslot of an average of 256 on a 1.84 - 3.84mhz channel. Data sessions are no different, except for the additional requirement of land-based bandwidth to the site.

Example, you are in a rural area, and are using att 3g on a cappy with a wifi hotspot for use on your computer.. you download a 4gb ISO file cause you have an unlimited data connection. You get a decent rate, about 6Mbit download. Congratulations, you just ate up the entire goddamn spectrum for about an hour. During this time, the sector is dividing the channel between you and whoever else is on the same sector, and will start diverting them to secondary carrier if applicable, or an alternate channel on the same sector if available. If you put an spectrum analyzer on the frequency you'd see a continuous run of wave forms, meaning no idle time, meaning no one else can talk with out time dividing your session. But if that ISO was only 50 - 100K, it'd be a short continuous waveform going away after less than a second. Because data is not easily measured in time, they used transfer.. Thats the marketing problem.. It is also why most of the time you only get 50 - 60% of the maximum HSDPA rated throughput.. They dont want one person to eat up the entire spectrum. But when you think of how many people a cellular site serves, even that doesnt go very far.

Are we within our rights to download to our hearts contend cause we have an unlimited data plan? Yes! Absolutely! Sorry AT&T for not understanding what the F(*&K it was you were selling back in the day..

Are we screwing our fellow man to abuse this oversight? Yes, absolutely.

Point 3: AT&T is FAR to disconnected inside its own company to ever figure our who is tethering or not.. So for those who want to screw their fellow man by sticking it to the MAN, feel free. I frankly hate AT&T and wish they would die.. but until verizon gets here I'm stuck with them.

End my rant, hope it makes some sense I'm a little drunk at the moment.