[bedoig]

Honestly, I've never seen a shred of evidence that suggests PDANet does anything to "hide" the fact that your tethering. PDANet, USBModem, WModem, etc all merely emulate a dial-up modem, allowing your PC to see it as such. Then you use normal dialing rules just as your phone does on its own - ie, dial #777 and enter a username/password if your network requires it.

Carrier efforts to curb tethering are usually crude. Verizon typically just removes or hides Internet Sharing and/or WModem. Sprint typically includes the apps, as they do offer PAM plans, but attempt to restrict dialing #777 unless you actually have PAM on your account. In the past, rilphone.dll was used to block those data calls, resulting in all those error 67 messages. Recently, Sprint merely used the ForceCellConnection reg key to lock Internet Sharing to the Phone as Modem profile. I'm not entirely sure that even does anything though, because I can connect just fine using that profile and I've never been charged, or even seen any differences noted on my bill. And I don't have PAM on my account. It might be worth looking into what settings actually differ between the PAM and Sprint PCS profiles.

I don't think they really have anything in place to "detect" that you are tethering. Even their 5GB caps on data cards and PAM plans don't appear to be affecting non-PAM tethering, leading me to believe that they just really aren't paying attention. It seems strange that these major networks would be so lax with their usage restrictions, but that is the way it seems to be. I've used every phone I've ever owned on Sprint and Verizon (including several dumb-phones) to connect to their data networks. All you need are the appropriate drivers and the right dialing rules.

There is always someone, often an employee, who will tell you that the networks know exactly what is going on, that they are watching us, and that you are going to be charged thousands of dollars. I've never seen any creditable support of any of this though. Outside of maybe some idiot that uses it as their only internet connection and downloads hundreds of GBs of data per month, I'd say it is fairly safe. That said, I'd encourage everyone not to abuse the system. Appreciate the fact that you have speedy internet access when you really need it. Let's not ruin a good thing.

Different opinions, comments?