Verizon Follows AT&T’s Lead, Actively Blocking Tethering Without Dedicated Plans

Not long after AT&T began to actively counter tethering on unlimited plans and forcing customers onto tiered plans, Verizon has decided to do the same to customers with jailbroken and rooted phones running tethering apps without dedicated tethering plans using grandfathered unlimited plans.

Now, when customers attempt to tether, they are redirected to landing pages demonstrating Verizon’s recent suite of new tethering plans, causing many customers consternation and frustration as the new tethering plans are markedly more expensive and are not unlimited, making the capability less useful, especially on more capable 4G LTE smartphones which tout the mobile hotspot capability.

Verizon have yet to respond officially to the numerous reports of the active blocking of tethering functionality, but PhoneNews.com will follow up with the carrier and any responses will promptly be posted. As always, we at PhoneNews.com vehemently disagrees with this practice, as access should not be tiered based on whether information is accessed on a smartphone or a PC due to their near identical capabilities. With this latest move, Sprint now stands alone as the last carrier to actively promote and encourage unlimited data access on 3G and 4G service for device and tethering use.