What’s Up with All the Tethering? [Ask the Readers]

One irritation I get when sifting through our Google Analytics to size up how heavily trafficked my articles are relative to the other guys in an effort to try to feel briefly better about myself is that, when pulling up a given day’s visited URLs, right up in the top two or three articles is friggin’ David K’s Windows Phone 7 Tethers! You Can Do It NOW! scoop. Not far below it, some even older thing on T-Mobile MMS server settings, Doug Smith’s. The top MD all-time classics, throwing off my first-glance fuzzy math ego boost sessions.

I have no idea if this trick David somehow got a hold of works or not, not really interested (though I’m guessing it doesn’t), grateful of course for the contribution it made and continues to make to the site, as well as to Smith and his MMS settings thing, terrific stuff (though I made a cab that does the work for you on my old site), hope the two of them can pull that off again and maybe David K will with all the darts the man throws for you.

My question is who the hell is doing all this tethering? I haven’t tethered in .. I can’t remember the last time I tethered. I’ve got a laptop, I’m on the go sometimes, I work doing this and that, I’m up to stuff and I’m down to roll, ludin’ out and yeah I watch Trueblood, but these damn phones have become so good and effective for me that between the my old Nexus One, my Nexus S which suffered a cellular functionality loss during a toilet incident but still works on wifi and has a good screen though slightly greenish and my ol’ trusty computer, I’m covered and have no need for my laptop.

If I had an iPad or a Chromebook, that would likely remain a hypothetical situation because these damn phones are so damn computer-like in spite of being pocket-compatible. And it makes me think that these phones are cutting into the PC market and absorbing a lot of what would otherwise be units of desktop computer activity.

But back to Google Analytics and the ssh terminal to my right tailing the logs, I see this tethering article from almost a year ago, everybody’s still climbing onto it from out of nowhere from all over the world, I feel all alone on this diminished need to use something less phone-like than my phone. Or maybe I’m not alone, but because David K really nailed the big scoop and gets all the pageviews it feels that way.

Or maybe this is my way of exhibiting sustained pageview envy on a Friday night.

Do you tether? Why do you tether? What’s so important and big, physically, that you just gotta tether? Trying to cut the ISP cord any of you? Own the PlayBook? What do you make of these ripoff tethering plans? Which drains your laptop faster, tethering or one of those USB radio things? Any of you Sprint guys know that you have actual IP addresses? Can you get incoming connections?

Would the inability to tether, money and plans and rooting and jailbreaking not being an issue, be a dealbreaker for you in your next device, platform or carrier decision? Not for me. Also, anybody get busted yet with a scary letter or a heavy bill for going up against the man and tethering under the radar, something of which our chief editor is a vocal opponent (tethering, not the penalty, he says tethering is wrong, illegal, stealing etc)? If you don’t tether, what do you make of all these guys who want to tether so bad that they’ll land on some ancient article here of all places?

Regarding tethering on WinPho, there’s been some noise brewing about tethering and Mango and as more people catch wind of that, more googling onto that damn article that’s always laughing at my articles, sitting up a notch or two higher on the list, peeing down upon my own articles with glee. Damn.

Hey, speaking of David K, anybody seen him around lately? I want to take some shots at him, but he’s been off the radar for like two days, so what’s the point. Now I’m depressed. Guess it’s back to Google Analytics for me.