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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Sprint charge for tethering too? (I currently have a Sprint plan. I'm pretty sure that it's unlimited data, but they don't allow tethering without paying extra fees or rooting your device.)

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On my plan, not only do I have to pay for tethering on my "unlimited" plan, I am also limited to 3 or 5 gig of tethered data depending on how much I pay for tethering! The data on the phone is unlimited, tethered data is not.

That's a hell of a rent-seek for "-j MASQUERADE" at the bottom of it all. Sigh. jailbreak. This sure is going to seem quaint to our kids.

Yes, it's $29.99/month to enable the Sprint Hotspot. They disable the built-in tethering in Android and hide most tethering apps from the Play store.

That said, you can tether over USB or bluetooth with PdaNet or FoxFi without paying any fees or rooting the phone.

I just read the other day that if you disable the tethering on Sprint's website and only enable it on days that you need it, they actually pro-rate the $29.99/month charge to only the days that you enable or use it. So it comes out to $1/day rather than the whole $30/month. Still haven't confirmed that, but I need to look into it.

Yes, that's correct. I've tried the official Sprint Wi-Fi tethering on an HTC Evo 4G for a couple of days and I was only charged for those days. The device supports up to eight wireless connections. Setup was over the phone and was effective immediately. The last time I did this was in early 2010 and the experience was flawless. It's overall not worth the money to me, though, to leave it enabled permanently. There are some USB tethering apps that require a little client-side setup but they've worked for me as a casual single client solution.

blue tooth tethering sucks. it keeps disconnecting and i have to go through like a 8 step process to get it working again. FoxFi worked beautifully until i installed an update and it was blocked. now FoxFi is working on getting around ICS 4.0.4 on sprint. WTF is sprint thinking? why do they think people choose android over iphone? it's supposed to be more open. im so tired of this bullshit cat and mouse game.

I don't know what's wrong with your phone, but I have no such issues. Bluetooth is perfectly reliable and takes one click to connect/disconnect.

I can't speak for the reliability of jailbreak tethering methods, but I only use Bluetooth for Personal Hotspot on my iPhone and it works flawlessly with no connection issues at all (though I do have tethering as a legitimate part of my plan).

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