Tethering On iPhone - Why Hasn't It Come Yet?

For AT&T

, 2009 has been a year of failed promises. The company promised to bring services like tethering and microcell to its subscribers this year. With the year gone by, there is still an uncomfortable hush over enabling tethering while the 3G microcell service has remained only in 'public trials' so far.

So what's ailing the company in launching these features? While it is still understandable in the case of 3G microcell; the company started its test run only in September of last year, it is not the case with tethering. This feature has been in much demand for a long time now and AT&T promised that it would offer a tethering option "soon" way back in November of 2008.

There is evidently only one reason to why it has failed to come - the AT&T's network has continued its journey towards deterioration in the past year. Apple recorded its most profitable quarter ever in 2009 largely backed by the sale of iPhones and while this did pump up AT&T's own topline as well, the increasing iPhone density in the major American cities has meant any improvement in AT&T's network has been rendered ineffective due to a much larger data usage.

But that cannot be an excuse. Even when AT&T Mobility CEO hinted about tethering coming the first ever time, he had pointed out that it shall not be a free service and users might have to pay close to $30 a month for tethering. So, at a fee high enough to disincentivize a majority of users, it was still supposed to be made available to those who need it desperately.

If that is so, why hasn't it been made available yet? One plausible reason is that AT&T's focus has now shifted. While earlier AT&T's strategy was to make such services available at additional cost (in order to make up for extra bandwidth usage), the focus now seems to be on merely containing data usage explosion. A year back, AT&T wanted to maintain status quo of service levels while charging for extra data usage. Today, it has shifted to containing data usage and in fact reduce them until extra capacity is made available.

This is probably the reason why we are seeing more talks about introduction of usage based pricing. AT&T now sees limiting the existing data usage through disincentivization as the way forward rather than encourage more data usage albeit at extra cost to the consumers. While AT&T has played down these speculations, the company has not ruled out the possibilities either.

The road ahead is pretty chaotic for AT&T - From how much we can see, AT&T is unlikely to let their network deteriorate further with introduction of tethering; at least not till summer. Apple is likely to end its exclusive partnership at that point and the competition will decide whether or not AT&T chooses to offer these additional services. The bottomline is thus simple; no tethering at least for a few more months now.

What do you think?