On Wednesday, Apple released a fairly important software update for the iPhone, which added a whole load of features that many people have been waiting for for a long time – principally MMS, voice memo recording, and the ability to use copy, paste and undo functions while writing. Overall it’s a solid evolutionary update which just removes a few more of the barriers to entry which stand between Apple and the wallets of the non-believers, and adds a whole load more little, unremarked-upon niceties which just make the device even more pleasant to use.

Along with this, they added tethering, the ability to connect a computer to the internet via the iPhone.

Tethering is an excellent feature, seen in other phones since time immemorial. Plug your iPhone into your laptop (or even connect to it with bluetooth) and hey presto, internet-to-go.

Perfect, indeed, for the discerning blogger who likes writing in coffee shops.

Bearing that in mind, I was (to say the least) fairly disappointed to learn that tethering isn’t automatically available to people who upgrade their phone to the latest operating system. Far from it, in fact, they have to specially request the ability to tether their phone from O2. And, indeed, O2 would like to charge them a minimum of £15 per month for the privilege of actually using the internet connection that comes with their phone price plan.

To put that figure in perspective, my monthly contract, including some amount of talk-time that I never use, is £30 per month. Adding tethering to my contract, for those few occasions when it would come in really useful to me, would increase my monthly spending by 50%.

Now, clearly, O2 are a private company and are free to charge whatever they like for their services1. They are also in the privileged position of being the exclusive carrier of the only phone I’m interested in owning, and having me tied down to another 8 months of contract.

Here’s three simple reasons, though, that the amount of money O2 are asking for to allow tethering is quite simply ludicrous, and the whole situation is an utter, utter disappointment:

I use more data on the iPhone than I would on a computer

Typically, when I am bored and I pull out my iPhone, it’s to read blogs and check Twitter. I avoid writing lengthy blog posts or emails on it because I don’t really like writing without being able to see very much of the text2.

The upshot of this is that the amount of data I use when procrastinating with my iPhone is not a lot different to the amount I use on a laptop. On the laptop I’ll sit happily writing and reading, taking up very little bandwidth at all. On the phone I’ll be constantly refreshing, looking for more things to read, using bandwidth constantly.

I’m willing to go out on a limb, in fact, and say that I think I’d use less data in coffee shops if I could use my laptop than I do when I’m only allowed to use my iPhone.

What about when I want to tether a WiFi connection?

Included in the O2 iPhone price plan is access to the distributed network of Wireless Access Points called ‘The Cloud’. The majority of pubs, coffee shops and shopping centres I go in have The Cloud, and when I’m sat in them I can connect to the internet on my phone wirelessly.

Now, I’ve paid for that Wireless connection through my O2 bill. Using it doesn’t use any of O2‘s bandwidth. So why can’t I share it with my laptop? This seems utterly stupid, and utterly inconsistent.

But forget that, because next up is the biggest issue with the whole thing:

There’s no Pay-As-You-Go option

There’s no possibility, in O2‘s world, for a la carte usage of tethering. Either you pay at least £15, every month, or tethering is blocked. You can’t enable it for a day, or pay for it only as much as you use it. This is a binary decision – on or off. £15; or no tethering.

I’d probably quite happily accept a system whereby if I wanted to use tethering I’d have to pay £2 for the day, and then have it cut off again the day after. Some months I might even end up spending more than £15 on that. The situations where I’d want tethering – in the coffee shop, on the train – are always the exception, not the rule, for me. The way O2 are playing this, though, they’ll get no money out of me whatsoever. A Pay-As-You-Go option would have me reaching for my credit card this weekend.

This would be an all-round winner, and I’m gobsmacked that it isn’t an option. What are O2 playing at, exactly.

I don’t usually get irritated about these things. When people complain about the huge upgrade prices on their phones I’m the first to point out that they signed their contract, they committed to a minimum term, they can face the consequences of it. The tethering situation, though, is really irritating me, because it just feels like I’m being needlessly prevented from using a really great feature that I’m willing to pay a reasonable price to use, seemingly for no reason other than the stubbornness of O2.

Did I mention that I find that incredibly irritating?

  1. Of course, the fact that the price plan is described as including ‘unlimited data’, and their principle objection to tethering is increased data usage, sticks in the throat somewhat… [↩]
  2. As a side note, I actually rather like the iPhone’s keyboard, which receives criticism from Blackberry fans. I particularly like its excellent auto-correction, which is spookily accurate 95% of the time [↩]