AT&T Unlimited Data $ Increase

Understand that tethering does not save any data. It just allows you to use your phone the same way you are now using your hot spot. If you have an unlimited data plan on a phone then tethering makes sense as you can "get around" the fact that the unlimited data plan was meant for phone use only.
If you are using too much data you just have to buy a larger data plan to use with your phone and hot spot or cut down on your data usage. For whatever reason, Facebook eats data!!!!

Facebook! You need to go into your account settings and change the video options so that they do not automatically play when you see the posting. Even after you scroll past those, they continue downloading and data charges pile up.

monkey44 wrote:


The past three or four months we went from under 5g, to three or four "overage' charges of $10 per gig ... so, we notice lots of video **** comes on in FB etc, although we don't turn it on, we shut it off right away.

Tethering means to hard wire the phone to your computer via the mini USB jack and use it as a internet connection. Anymore it has been generalized to include using the wireless hotspot.

I used PDA.net to tether my Cricket Galaxy S4 until they opened up the hotspots for $10 a month. There was a risk that they would see the difference in the data I was using and had it affect the account as it was against the terms. There are ways to turn on the hotspots when they don't want them to work too.

Why don't they want you tethering without the extra charge? Because you can use a lot more data while tethering. Even the sites that load on your computer have more data than the mobile site would.

For us the two Cricket Phones provide 20 gigs a month at 4g and then they are throttled. The back ups are a Freedompop hotspot with a free gig of data a month and a Ringplus phone with a free gig and a half a month. That free 2 1/2 gigs would run us $30 at $10 a gig through Cricket.