I have an iPhone with Orange and when I try to enable personal Hotspot it tells me to contact orange to enable this on my account. This leads me to expect a tethering charge to be applied to my account. I already have a cap of 1 gig so as long as I don't go over this why should there be a charge, whichever device uses the data from the phone? I can understand if my data Plan was unlimited, but it isn't.

Because "hotspot" and data are two different things. You pay for your data plan and THEN if you want it to be a mobile hotspot then than will cost, I believe, another $10 per month. Tethering is an altogether different thing. If you tether via PdaNet or other tethering software that goes through your data plan. Since you don't have unlimited data, it will also eventually cost you.

Originally Posted by Mdorricott

I have an iPhone with Orange and when I try to enable personal Hotspot it tells me to contact orange to enable this on my account. This leads me to expect a tethering charge to be applied to my account. I already have a cap of 1 gig so as long as I don't go over this why should there be a charge, whichever device uses the data from the phone? I can understand if my data Plan was unlimited, but it isn't.

You need the Orange 'Tethering Bundle'. It's free on some of their 'top end' tariffs - you can see the details here

Orange Pay monthly iPhone plans Terms and Conditions

For other users an additional charge is payable. Although they don't say so, their rationale behind the additional charge is that most users don't actually use their full monthly allowance. Their experience has shown that tethering ('personal hotspot') significantly reduces the unused data that customers have on capacity-limited contracts. Thus they are facing additional costs overall for tethering and want to recoup that cost in some way or other.

Note that some service providers (I'm with '3') don't currently charge for tethering, so you might want to consider switching providers. I've heard that Vodafone don't charge either.

Tim
Scotland

Originally Posted by pastorsteve

Because "hotspot" and data are two different things. You pay for your data plan and THEN if you want it to be a mobile hotspot then than will cost, I believe, another $10 per month. Tethering is an altogether different thing. If you tether via PdaNet or other tethering software that goes through your data plan. Since you don't have unlimited data, it will also eventually cost you.

I understand this and I'm happy ton pay for anything I use over my limit. I just don't understand why I have to pay more just to use that data on my iPad. I pay for 1 gig data a month and cannot see what the difference is if I use this on phone or pass it to my iPad for viewing. I'm only using what I'm paying for regardless of which device I'm viewing on, it all goes through the phone anyway. I dont see why I should pay more just to view on my iPad when I've paid for the data in my plan. Like I say, I'm happy to pay if I go over the limit