Plane B

Tethering for the iPhone that Makes Sense for All

Apple seems to be having a hard time deciding what to do with Nullriver’s NetShare iPhone tethering app. Tethering means using your mobile phone’s data connection to connect your laptop to the Internet.  This turns out to be very useful in places where wifi is not available or where there is a charge for it, as there is in many airports and hotels.  There’s nothing fancy about the technology behind tethering, especially with a device like the iPhone that is running a powerful modern operating system.  Indeed, it’s unlikely it took the folks at Nullriver very long at all to write NetShare.

The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the economics.  Nullriver decided to sell NetShare for a one-time $10 charge.  At standard App Store rates that means $3 goes to Apple and $7 goes to Nullriver.  But nothing goes to AT&T, the ones who actually provide the bandwidth NetShare consumes.  AT&T offers tethering plans for a number of 3G phones and charges about $30 a month for them.  It does not, however, offer a tethering plan for the iPhone at any price.  Until NetShare appeared in the App Store, the only way to tether with an iPhone was to jailbreak it.

Shortly after NetShare appeared in the App Store, it was removed.  It then reappeared briefly only to disappear again shortly thereafter. In all, it was available for no more than a few hours.  Behind the scenes, there were no doubt some frantic conference calls between Apple, AT&T, and Nullsoft.

It was fairly surprising to me to see Apple’s indecision with regard to NetShare bleed out into a public arena.  But I think Apple has all the tools they need to re-enable iPhone tethering at a price all concerned can live with.  All one has to do is think back to the wild-west days of napster and the battles between the record labels and the free MP3 downloaders.  In those days, the technology existed to quickly and easily rip and share MP3s of any CD you could get your hands on.  The record companies wanted to the technology to go away so that they could keep on selling CDs according to their standard business model.  Consumers wanted to be able to listen to their music digitally on any of the myriad of devices that could play it.  Finally, Apple came along and convinced everyone that there was a better way.  They created iTunes, which allowed consumers to quickly and easily locate the music they wanted and pay a fair price for the combination of selection and convenience.  Apple also convinced the recording industry that the technology was here to stay, so they would be better off to sign up for a business model that let them monetize the technology.

What Apple needs to do now is convince AT&T to enable tethering just as they convinced the record companies to enable digital music downloads.  I have no doubt that a lot of iPhone users would be willing to pay a reasonable price for an easy to use one-click tethering solution.

Personally, I’d be willing to pay $5-10 per month for it.  It’s not worth more than that because it is only useful in a handful of situations. 3G is nowhere near as fast or reliable as the broadband connections I have at home and work, so I definitely wouldn’t use it there.  I also wouldn’t use it any place that has free wifi connected to any sort of decent broadband.  So that leaves the handful of places I go every month that charge for wifi or the places where there is no wifi at all.  Currently, I use my iPhone 3G if I need to get online in those places.  Maybe once a month I both (a) have my laptop with me in a place without free wifi, and (b) need to have a bigger screen, a full keyboard, and copy and paste.  That’s about the only time I would tether.

The $10 price point (vs. $30 on other phones) should also make sense for AT&T.  Unlike on other phones, where browsing and other bandwidth-intensive apps are limited or non-existent, the iPhone already supports browsing with Safari and streaming video with YouTube.  So the incremental bandwidth used by the average tethering user is going to be smaller.  AT&T may fear people running bit-torrent via 3G all day long, but in reality, most users are going to stick to higher bandwidth connections for that sort of thing.

I hope that Apple and AT&T can get together and make affordable tethering a reality for millions of users.  There no good technical or economic reason not to.  If they don’t, users will continue to jailbreak their phones and do it for free anyway.  Apple already solved this problem for digital music sales.  There’s no reason they should not also be able to do it for tethering.