Windows Phone to support USB Tethering, no extra fees allowed?

Whether you’re shouting your love for Windows Phone 7 from the tallest buildings or bashing it at every opportunity, one bit is mostly inarguable: it’s..a bit short on selling points. Most of what it does, the competition does already; most of what it doesn’t do, the competition does that too.

If this seemingly solid rumor turns out true, though, it might have at least one strength to its name: USB Tethering… without the option for carriers to charge any extra fees.

The word comes from Richard Dudley, evangelist for the Window-dev-tool-building folks over at ComponentOne. Richard is at a Microsoft-hosted event right now, from where he reports:

Official Word — Windows Phone 7 will support USB tethering, carriers can NOT charge extra, above the data plan.”

That’s pretty good news, considering that most carriers have recently taken to charging an extra chunk of change per month on top of the standard data plans. Data plans that, for the most part, come with a limited amount of bandwidth usage per month — and no, the tethering fee doesn’t get you any more monthly megabytes.

Of course, there are always unofficial ways around the fees; jailbroken iPhones have access to things like PDANet, while Android users have a bevy of options available to them if they’re willing to do a bit of tinkering. But to not have to worry about such things and not have to worry about dropping extra cash just to use the data allotment you’re already paying for? You feel that, Microsoft? That’s a pat on the back.

[Via WMPowerUser]