Windows Phone Thoughts: What Should We Pay For?

One of my friends, a new Pocket PC Phone convert, was a bit dismayed last night when it took him a few hours to get his new HTC Touch to teather correctly to his laptop. He was doing all the right steps, but the phone was a no-go. The really odd part? Well, the phone had teathered just fine at his home in Charlottesville, VA and at my place outside Toledo, OH - but now in San Francisco, CA, it was having none of the internet sharing goodness he wanted.

Why? Well it seems that while he had an unlimited data plan on his phone and the phone would teather just fine over the slower 1xRTT connections in Virginia and Ohio, the faster EVDO speeds in California were causing him trouble. Long story short, in his provider's system, he had unlimited data for the phone (even highspeed data for the phone) - just not unlimited highspeed cellular data for tethering. After an hour on the phone, the representative he talked to finally was able to get the account straightened out - and he had Internet.

Now while my friend's situation is a bit odd (His account setup was partially to blame), it got me wondering - what should we pay for? I've always felt that if I'm paying for an unlimited data plan for my phone, any way I get that data to other devices should also be covered. In my eyes, I could just as easily download the file to my phone and then copy it to the laptop, or just download it to the laptop directly. However some providers don't see it that way (Heck, some providers in other countries don't even offer unlimited data in th first place - a situation I am sympathetic to!). And we've often joked that some US providers would charge by the button-press if they had the ability to. So should we be paying extra for tethering? Extra for higher speeds even though our device supports them? Or even Extra for data in the first place when the main selling point of our devices is the data connectivity?