According to a message on Twitter made by developer Richard Dudley of ComponentOne fame, Microsoft has officially confirmed to developers that it will mandate free USB tethering capability at on all of its Windows Phone 7 devices, effectively ordering carriers to sell the devices with free tethering and prohibiting the sale of typically expensive tethering plans on the devices. For Microsoft to make such a mandate demonstrates the lengths the company is going to to make Windows Phone 7 a success.
As carriers continue to push tethering and mobile hotspot services on high-end smart devices for a typically inflated additional cost, the possibility of Windows Phone 7 devices being sold by carriers with tethering service included would make the consumer-oriented devices more attractive to corporate clients and enthusiasts that would normally desire and have a need for such services.
As of now, the only smart devices sold in the US with included tethering capability at no additional cost are the Verizon Palm Pre and Pixi Plus, which PhoneNews.com has extensively covered previously in regards to taking advantage of the service.
Update: The previous message has been deleted due to a misunderstanding and stresses that the functionality is still unconfirmed.
Windows Phone 7 has a USB port, however it cannot tether wirelessly. Not via WiFi or Bluetooth. Most of its competitors can tether their internet connections wirelessly.
Very interesting indeed. I hope M$ can pull this off and NAIL the telcos to the bloody WALL on this one. And as AT&T is main partner on WM7, what I wouldn’t give to hear those investors and corp execs won’t name names) SCREAM over this one. Verizon and Sprint can crank up the decibels too. I think T-Mobile will just quietly go along with it, as they have been all along.
“Correction to #WP7 tethering–that is not official, may not happen. I misunderstood a discussion. Tweet removed. My apologies.”
http://twitter.com/rj_dudley/status/24657894787
@Jonkie- is the statement that wireless tethering is not possible on Windows Phone 7 something that MS has announced? I would hope that if they allow it via USB they’ll allow applications like “WiFi Router” to run on the phone to create a wireless option. If they don’t it won’t kill me but I’d like to have the option.
So the tweet has been removed due to a misunderstanding. Ahhh, well, so much for that. We still can hope though, that M$ does make this an “Official Mandate”, although I can’t see how the carriers would be willing to go along with it unless they just raise the basic dataplan price $20-30 or so. Those extra dollars are just too precious to those investors and CEO’s to pass up.
As for wi-fi hotspot, using standard wi-fi chips in ad-hoc mode to do this really seems to heat up the batteries in smartphones quite a bit. I tried wmWiFiRouter and didn’t buy it and stopped using it for this very reason. I don’t know if WP7 specs call for a router function in the hardware to efficiently implement this as the android phones do but if present I see no reason why these apps couldn’t be developed on WP7 as well.