Tethering clarification

Hi TJ,

Your terms of service allow unlimited bandwidth to the phone, and prohibit tethering. In other words, there is no 5 GB limit, but transfering a single byte through a tethered connection violates your TOS.

However, I can't recall seeing a single case on this forum where a Droid owner reports being penalized for tethering. The advice everyone offers is to use it in moderation -- don't download videos or stream music through a tethered connection.

 

According to your contract with VZW you are not allowed to tether your droid. Period. End of story. Not five gigabytes. Not one gigabyte. Not one byte. Period.

On the other hand, there is currently no five gigabyte limit on download/updload traffic to your Droid. Period. Your data plan is UNLIMITED! Period. End of story.

The five gigabyte confusion arises from the fact that Verizon's "broadband access" plans for other devices (such as so-called "air cards") do have a five gigabyte per month limit on the 3G (but not wifi) network.

If you use PDANet (or any other tethering application) you are violating your service agreement with Verizon. Whether you will be caught, charged, or in anyway suffer the consequences of said violation is another question, altogether. There does not appear to have been a documented case of anyone being charged (or even contacted) by Verizon for tethering their Droid.

Hopefully, that resolves your questions.

P.S. Now that two people have responded identically, take it as gospel.

 

Who told you 5gb?

 

What about the incredible. I heard that you can tether that for free and not void anything.

 

You can download anything you want onto your phone as long as you have space on your SD card. You just cannot tether without possibility of repercussions from VZW

 

From a contractual standpoint I doubt there is anything that would prevent you from doing what you're suggesting. The problem, I suspect, lies in how you can dl the file to your droid. Haven't tried it because I have no use for the feature, but if the browser you're using would support such a large download, I assume you could dl to your sd card and then transfer it to your pc via the usual mounting approach. I'm suspecting, though, that the browser might have trouble with such a large download.

All of this is likely to be moot before too much longer as various carriers adopt a tiered approach to downloading data and those who download tv shows pay for it.