Appmodo: Official AT&T iPhone Tethering to Cost $55 Per Month

Appmodo:

A source with AT&T informed Appmodo today that MMS for the iPhone will be coming mid July, not “the end of the summer” as previously reported. The highly anticipated tethering option will also be delivered towards the end of July with pricing around $55 per month, not $70 as suspected across the net.

That sounds outrageously high to me, unless they mean $55 total, not $55 in addition to the existing $30 data plan. If they want $85 a month for tethered data, that’s larceny. What are carriers in other countries charging?

Update: Here are the rates from O2 in the U.K.; they strike me as high but reasonable. (Note that O2’s data plans are metered, so you can save quite a bit of money if you stay under 3 GB of data for the month.) In Canada, Rogers includes tethering in their higher-end data plans for no extra cost; the sweet spot looks to me to be Rogers’s 6 GB plan for CDN$30/month.

In Austria and New Zealand, there is no extra charge for tethering. It just works with your existing data plan.

And our Scandinavian friends are all sharing a good laugh at our expense. Unlimited data plans with tethering run about US$20/month in Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

★ Thursday, 18 June 2009