Will Carriers Charge More for Playbook Tethering to a BlackBerry?

Problems

On of the big questions I have about the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook and its ability to leach off the 3G connection of a BlackBerry smartphone is if carriers will charge extra for it. We are still not hearing from RIM if the PlayBook will have a BIS connection and transfer all its data through the RIM NOC’s like BlackBerry smartphones. We know that in Bridged mode it just shows you a nicer larger view of a BlackBerry smartphones email, BBM, and other applications so that will obviously still go through RIM’s servers. On the other hand the tethering to a BlackBerry is still unknown.

My guess is that RIM will once again bow to the carriers will but I really wish that just once they would stand up for their end user customers. They could make the 3G tethering in such a way that the carriers would have no idea and it would just use your regular BlackBerry smartphones data bucket. Especially with carriers in the US who have already started placing tiers on data this would make sense.

What do you think will happen?

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