Verizon Announces iPhone Personal Hotspot Pricing
January 26, 2011
Along with the Verizon iPhone, Apple is introducing, in iOS 4.3, a new Wi-Fi tethering mode known as personal hotspot. It will allow you to share your iPhone's data connection over Wi-Fi with up to five devices as long as your carrier enables it. While we don't know whether AT&T will allow it, Verizon will, and they just announced pricing for the feature.
Similar to the AT&T pricing for tethering, Verizon will be charging its iPhone customers $20 per month to activate the Wi-Fi sharing feature. Unfortunately, data exchanged over tethering will be capped at 2GB/month, and every additional GB will cost an additional $20. So while it's a better deal than AT&T's, it won't let you take full advantage of Verizon's $30 unlimited iPhone data plan that was announced recently.
So is it really worth it? It depends. If you consider this allows you to save on a separate MiFi device and its plan, or the need for a separate data plan for your Wi-Fi iPad then it is a very good deal. On the other hand, if the Verizon iPhone gets jailbroken, apps like MyWi, will allow you to share your data over Wi-Fi with no additional costs or restrictions.
