Alternate (that works) is drop your data plan from $25 2 Gbytes to $15 / 250 Megabytes, and go buy a $60/Month Sprint MiFi/5 Gigabytes (Wireless HotSpot).

Total Net Cost is $35/month above what the iPhone normally costs. $60 (Sprint) - $10 (Data Plan Savings) - $15 (Tethering Cost)

The net costs are less if you have an iPad AND an iPhone, as you don't have to purchase a 3G iPad or a Data plan for it.

Advantages:

  o Data Limit is 5 Gigabytes instead of 2.
  o iPhone, iPad, Laptops all can (simultaneously) use it.
  o You now have Sprint and AT&T Data Coverage.
  o All of the "WiFi only" rules work on the MiFi
    (Facetime, AppStore download Limit)

And you get unlimited 4G. (With the download rates I get, I calculated it as about 1.3TB per month. Much more generous than AT&T's 250MB.)

If you have a tethered laptop why not just use the webcam that most laptops have shipped with for years now?

Because you can't use Facetime with your notebook's webcam.

If anybody has tried the 1-888-FACETIME line to test out facetime, it seems that the apple reps are using a webcam instead ... they talk as per the script about switching to the iphone etc. but for some reason, it seemed like they were not using iPhones (image quality, orientation, etc.) ... Apple probably coded some internal tool to mimic facetime .. i tried this call twice and i got the same impression both times

The functionality is no doubt coming to iChat, maybe they have special build they are using to do it now.

Cool, but I'll just say it. Impractical.

It may be more convenient for the other party, if they don't have Skype or don't have a computer but there's a hotspot to use FaceTime. It's a good alternative and if it's this easy for the party w/ a computer than it might be the more practical option if you want to video chat.

It'll work, but at an extra $15 a month for an even more inconvenient way of FaceTime... I'll wait for the jailbreak. I want my iBlacklist back too.

The ironic thing is that you could also use FaceTime while walking on the street if you're walking with a friend that has an Android phone with the ability to make his phone a WiFi hot spot.

Yup! This capability is built into 2.2 and if you're still on 2.1 and your phone is rooted there are great apps like Barnacle which is completely free (there is also a paid version for donation purposes).

A while back I had to do something similar to download a podcast. The iPhone doesn't let you download apps or iTunes media (including podcasts) that are over 10MB in size over the cellular network. So I tethered to my MacBook, downloaded in iTunes, and synced the podcast back to the device.

I've run into that 10MB problem, too! I think I remember Apple's threshold was 100MB originally, and the 10MB one is just absurd. These solutions seem a little bulky, but the tethering is to the point it's pretty seamless. I just wish an iPhone 4 jailbreak would come out so I could go back to MyWi instead of paying AT&T an extra $15/mo.

It was increased to 20MB near the end of 2009.

Devs can get around this by downloading extra bits on first startup or heavily compressing big datasets and decompressing them on first startup. Only a handful do, but there are ways around it. It would be nice if it was just a warning instead of a strict rule.

So it's.... how to use facetime without wifi by creating a wifi hotspot with your laptop? How is that not using wifi?

Apple products sure are easy to use.

If Apple opened up the protocol tomorrow, there'd be a better (3G) implementation on Android fairly sson.