Many people may not know, but one major aspect of Net Neutrality which is now law in the United States is that the data service you pay for as part of your mobile plan is not allowed to be restricted to just your phone. By law, you can tether any device(s) you want through your phone’s data connection. In case you don’t know what that means, it means connecting a laptop, home computer, tablet, or any other device to the Internet through your phone.
The basic principle behind this is that data is data. If you pay for say 4GB/month then you get it, regardless of what device the traffic initiated from or is destined to.
This may seem ridiculously obvious, but it wasn’t to most if not all major carriers in the United States which connived and tried to bill customers for tethering, with their multi-million-if-not-billion-dollar lobby with the federal (and state and even local) government.
Anyhow, the point of this post is that you never know when you are going to need to use the data on your mobile plan. Obviously if you’re traveling you might want to use it. In fact when traveling I prefer it over using a potentially insecure hotel or other network. I have MetroPCS (now part of T-Mobile) and for $50/month I have an unlimited voice + 4GB data plan which is usually way more than sufficient for my needs.
But there may be times when you also need it at home. For example today there’s a service outage with my broadband provider. No problem – just switch on mobile hotspot on my Android phone and here I am!
Its worthwhile to set up the mobile hotspot/tethering feature of your phone. I actually have met people who pay additional money for a separate data plan because they didn’t understand that they can tether devices through their mobile plan and use the data.
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