Haven't been booted off yet I see?

No.  Had a youtube video stop 15 minutes in, on my android tablet tethered to the phone, but said tablet is known for being a bit troublesome.

Signed up again for a few hours because the wifi in this Koru lounge (customer let me in) is too slow and flakey and I'm stuck here until 6pm.

It's letting me rsync a few gigabytes from home, run firefox, nextcloud sync, etc on my Linux laptop.  SSHed into our hosting infrastructure to fix a wordpress+woocommerce bizzarity.  Tried out OpenVPN (UDP) which worked just fine too.

Now this is increasing their ARPU because I didn't *need* those few gigabytes from home, really, and I have >10GB of zone+carryover data on my prepay account.  But good to know it works and that for the moment, for my needs, it doesn't boot me off saying "YOU SHALL NOT TETHER."  Certainly makes the "should I pay to use this overpriced hotspot, or just tether" question easier to answer.

1eStar: They might as well allow tethering on the data clock, its not as if people are going to drop their home plans to pay $180 a month to hotspot off their phones.

1eStar: They might as well allow tethering on the data clock, its not as if people are going to drop their home plans to pay $180 a month to hotspot off their phones.

I've done a bit of thinking and testing with this and so far I've come to a few light conclusions.

I don't have a home connection (or a home).

I use my office WiFi a bit, and I tether quite a lot.

So I buy the $100 for 12GB zone data addon, rinse & repeat.

I've basically figured out that the data clock pricing works in my favour if I'm streaming video for the time, but not if i'm not.

...so if I want to spend an hour watching YouTube, or the news or something, I can buy an hour, or two.

However, I can't tell if i'm actually using the data clock data, or if I'm whittling away at my 12GB. It's pretty hard to tell because I don't think the 2Degrees App updates very quickly.

I'll have to do some structured testing around this to make sure I'm not wasting money buying data clock minutes that I'm not using. If anyone has done this testing, i'd love to hear your results.

I don't think they are preventing users from using a hotspot, but they would be perfectly within their rights to change that tomorrow, or in 3 months time without telling anyone, and a regular tetherer could suddenly be getting charges they weren't expecting.

The other thing this forces me to do, is to have credit on my prepay balance.

Typically I run my prepay balance at $0.00, because otherwise I end up getting charged for little things here and there (like MMS, or casual data, or I don't know what). I prefer to know in advance if it wants to charge me for something, then I can make an intelligent decision. This also gives them the use of my money, which certainly helps the business case on their side, and keeps the data clock pricing affordable.

There was mention somewhere of a 'game changer'. I certainly take my hat off to 2Degrees for being innovative and introducing something that hasn't been seen in this space since dial-up.

Edwood:

 

 

 

However, I can't tell if i'm actually using the data clock data, or if I'm whittling away at my 12GB. It's pretty hard to tell because I don't think the 2Degrees App updates very quickly.

 

The Data Clock app should be pretty quick. Generally within seconds. The Android one is a little nicer than iOS because it can let you know it's running out in the notification bar.

 

 

 

Typically I run my prepay balance at $0.00, because otherwise I end up getting charged for little things here and there (like MMS, or casual data, or I don't know what).

 

Prepay casual data is disabled once you register for Data Clock (disclaimer: you will need to either buy a pack or manually restart your data session immediately after registration for this to take effect) so other than MMS you won't need to worry about accidentally chewing up money.

Tethering ban isnt enforced at any level on their network.

I'd love to see how much actual data I've used in a session too... but many of these things don't really work in favour of 2D

Edwood:

I'd love to see how much actual data I've used in a session too... but many of these things don't really work in favour of 2D

 

T'would be nice to be just sitting there on the app, but yep, if I really want to know, I can collect the data by 'resetting the odometer'.  Thanks!