Verizon Wireless wants to crack down on folks who perform illegal tethering on their devices—if you happen to fall under that category of using apps to help you “tether illegally,” then you might want to sit up and take notice. Verizon will now show a warning page when it catches a user tethering without paying, and provides a number to call to set up a mobile broadband package.

After rumors of this news began circulating, an AT&T spokesperson has confirmed that the carrier will be taking away users’ unlimited data plans if they choose to tether or hotspot on the plan. AT&T will automatically be moving those users to a $45/month 2GB tethering plan without the customer’s consent, and the carrier is rumored to start doing this as of August 11th.

Possibly the most anticipated new feature to come with iOS 4.3 is the Personal Hotspot capability. If you have an iPhone 4, after March 11 you’ll be able to turn your iPhone into a personal wireless hotspot, allowing you to connect your Mac and/or iPad to the Internet where there isn’t an existing WiFi signal available for use. When you enable Personal Hotspot, you’ll be able to connect up to five devices to your iPhone 4 via WiFi, Bluetooth and USB to share your 3G data connection.

With the news that Verizon would continue to offer its unlimited data plan for $30/month, there was only one piece missing from the iPhone puzzle: tethering. Verizon announced that their version of the iPhone would be usable as a mobile hotspot for up to five devices, but didn’t mention what the plan would cost, or how much data users would get. Until today. According to Verizon Wireless’s Executive Director of Corporate Communications, Brenda Raney, tethering will set you back $20/month (on top of the $30 data plan), and will allow you to download 2GB of data. If you go over that amount, another gig will cost you another Jackson.

The Verizon iPhone 4 announcement today contained at least one surprise. When Verizon announced the pricing they let it slip that the 32GB $299 version would have mobile hotspot included. Wait, what? What’s a mobile hotspot and why doesn’t my AT&T iPhone have it? Mobile hotspot is a great feature that will let you share your cellular data connection with other devices over a WiFi connection. It appears from screenshots that Apple is calling this a personal hotspot and that the capability is built in to the iOS (4.2.5) that was running on the demo Verizon iPhones.

The biggest actual news is that the Verizon iPhone will feature hotspot capability. You’ll be able to tether up to five devices to the phone and use it to connect to the internet. The other thing you’re going to be hearing a lot about from the tech press and especially AT&T is that the Verizon iPhone will run on the 3G CDMA network, rather than the newer, faster 4G LTE network.

AT&T’s CEO Ralph de la Vega made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco this month that tethering for the iPhone 3G is coming “soon.” While the exact dates of “soon” weren’t defined, I think this time it actually has some truth to it. We’ve waited for more than a year now for AT&T to get their act together and prepare their network, and they’re well aware of our growing impatience. Although I fear that it may harm their network even more, it could cost them more in bad PR if they never even get around to giving the feature a chance.

As most of you probably know, Apple recently released iPhone 3.1 beta 2 to developers to play with. Along with some bugs fixes and improvements in code, this update features the breaking of the IPCC hack we saw that enabled tethering for AT&T early on the iPhone. Since AT&T won’t be supporting iPhone tethering until later in the year for an undetermined price, this is sort of a bummer for the people who found this workaround useful.

It was quite a while ago that AT&T announced it would at one time support tethering on Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone 3.0 software is upon us, and it officially supports a tethering application from Apple, but users won’t be able to take advantage of it until later this summer when AT&T actually tells us the details (release date, prices). That said, there are some rumors floating around of what AT&T may announce.

MMS and Tethering, on iPhone, on AT&T…later…this…summer. I couldn’t help but laugh, and I know I wasn’t the only one. Funny how a large number of carriers in other countries can manage to support both MMS and tethering on iPhone 3GS launch day, but AT&T just can’t pull it together quite yet. No one really knows just when “later this summer” really is, but at least one other question was left unanswered. How much will this all cost?