This post was published 7 months 20 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.

What’s up with mobile phone carriers in the US and their seemingly authoritative dictatorship about cellphones and what you can do on them? Today, AT&T fired the latest shot in the war over cellular data.

Looks like AT&T’s taking some aggressive steps to manage network traffic now that it’s offering subsidized netbooks — the carrier updated its data plan terms of service last night to specifically single out and prohibit “downloading movies using P2P file sharing services, customer initiated redirection of television or other video or audio signals via any technology from a fixed location to a mobile device, web broadcasting, and… any applications that tether the device… to Personal Computers or other equipment.” That’s an impressively strict set of rules that seemingly bans a number of apps AT&T customers are already using without complaint — everything from SlingPlayer to Qik to Skype to Jaikuspot — so we’ll see if the company is really so tone-deaf as to try and retroactively prohibit their use, or if it’ll just ignore what it can’t possibly enforce.

Hey AT&T how about you focus your attention to establish reliable 3G coverage – then we can talk about building the technology to track data usage, OKAY?!

Read More