Wifi app for iPhone?

If you read the fine print tethering is not allowed on the att unlimited plan. and even if you hack your iphone, you are going to be throttled at 3-5gb anyway. Now a days the only thing the unlimited plan is good for is a teenager with imessage. It still works when throttled, just painfully slow and no overage charges.

I think the "unlimited" data plan was issued with them thinking you had an aircard plugged into a computer....one computer. I got a letter from them when I started using the Cradlepoint with the aircard plugged into it and sharing the connection. I ended up going to the AT&T share everything plan with 6G of data. Only once did I come close to going over. Works great.

If one has an Android phone or a jailbroken iPhone, there is always FoxFi or PDANet.

I understand the desire to save cost. This is just my usage experience. Instead of switching my iPhone 5 to a hotspot and using my unlimited data plan I went with a 20G Millenicon MiFi which is a Verizon product. We use about 15G per month for this product and sometimes have approached their upper limit. We do some streaming video but no movies. We have 3 cell phones and have peaked at just under 3G on them but typically stay between 1-2G.

So my message is be sure to understand what you will be doing. If just email and reading on web sites, then you may not use much. If you Skype or YouTube or watch quick help videos or news videos your usage may go up quicker than you might expect.

My wife had an unlimited plan on her phone, and was resistant to switching to a shared plan, but I showed her how little data she used compared to what she thought she did, and that "unlimited" meant 3gb with severe restrictions after.

We also had 4 other phone lines, mine with 200mb, 2 other shop lines with 200mb, and grandma's traditional phone. When I showed her that for the same money, we could have a 10gb share plan, everyone gets unlimited talk and texts and shares the 10gb data, so if she wanted she could use 9.5gb as long as the total did not exceed 10. We can also hotspot the ipad and not have to pay for a line for it. She was sold and we dumped the "unlimited" We have yet to use over total of 4gb, but with the number of devices, I would save a total of $7 by dropping to 4gb so I just leave it.

I am actually the biggest user of data. I listen to my favorite talk radio station on iheart radio for an hour in the morning and in the afternoon (can't pick it up on car stereo) So 2 hours a day, aproximately 20 days a month. Uses about 2gb. The biggest use of data is of course movies.

And I am glad for the unlimited minutes, grandma at 99 loves to talk to her daughter across the country and her friends. Last month she used 2200 daytime minutes. With our old plan, we had 850 plus rollover and we would have to tell her to be carefull about daytime becuase she would exceed the limit, now it doesn't matter.

t-mobile has recently interested me, their plan for 5 phones would be about 60% our current plan, and I like the idea of putting a down payment on the phone and 24 monthly payments separate from the service. When the device is paid off, that part of your bill dissappears, vs continuing to subsidize the device. Also, no 2 year agreement, every service plan is month to month. If you quit before paying off a device, all you owe is the remainder of the device. Unfortunately, ther service in our area has been dismal, but suposedly getting better.

Pls report back. Curious minds love to know.

Thanks everyone. I have never paid any attention to how much data I use in a month. I use my phone so much, I will be curious to see how much.

Before we had a dedicated hotspot we used to use tether.com to connect a single laptop to the iPhone 4S wirelessly. It's not the same as a hotspot because it's only 1 connection at a time, but it's only $30/year for the tether subscription. You need to install a small app on the computer, and browse to tether.com in safari on the phone, so it's a bit clunky but it's cheap.

Beverley&Ken wrote:

Desert Captain wrote:
Not an app but on my I-Phone 5 if you go to "Settings" the 5th choice down is "Personal Hotspot". I have Verizon and it works great. My new RV GPS locks on in seconds to give me real time weather and other updates direct from the internet.

:C

Same on our I-phone 4

Beverley and Ken

Only works for Verizon users. AT&T requires you to drop the unlimited plan to activate the hotspot feature. By the way, when I hit 3GB on my unlimited AT&T account they sent me a text message stating they would throttle me down to low speed (probably dial up) if I did it again.

Desert Captain wrote:
Not an app but on my I-Phone 5 if you go to "Settings" the 5th choice down is "Personal Hotspot". I have Verizon and it works great. My new RV GPS locks on in seconds to give me real time weather and other updates direct from the internet.

:C

Same on our I-phone 4

Beverley and Ken