T-Mobile blocked tethering for 8520

I've been using my Curve 8520 to tether my laptop without any problems, I tried to use it the other day and it gave me a configuration information error. I messed with it for awhile, reinstalled the desktop manager, upgraded it, nothing. Called 611, explained, apparently 2g phones do not offer a satisfying tethering experience for the customer so support for tethering my device is not provided by t-mobile. I was told to try finding a way to connect on blackberry forums. So you're telling me I have to hack my way in basically? Yep. Any help?

T-Mobile Charges for Tethering now. They probably detected you tethering and blocked it.

And I thought the 8520 was a 3G phone? I was thinking about getting one on the cheap as a second line for business use...

Apparently it's a 2g. Yeah I'd have to pay 15 more a month and buy a new phone for 200. They aren't offering support for 2g phones to tether. What's next? I can't receive text messages unless I buy a 4g phone and pay 10 more bucks a month?

I was tether blocked yesterday; it's not ideal, but we'd been using the tether for our primary internet connection at home. For some reason, TMO says they're going to enforce the throttle, but then somehow DOESN'T, so this block was the first hurdle we've really encountered. Even then, BitTorrent continued like nothing was wrong, it just affected web surfing, so it seems that TMO is just redirecting traffic based on the user-agent value. This makes sense, because how else can they really tell what's legitimate phone traffic, and what's tethered?

So I've found 2 and a half ways around the tether block. One way is to change the user-agent string in your browser so that it matches your phone. (you can check your user-agent value at showip.net; changing the string in chrome is just adding a --user-agent="..." to the launch shortcut) The downside is that many websites think you're a phone, which can be annoying.

Another way is to use TOR, The Onion Router, with Firefox. This works pretty well, but it... seems slower? It's not really quantifiable. And you get funky localization / security-related issues sometimes.

And the "half" a way is to just change http to https in the URL of whatever you're going to, since it seems like TMO is just checking the user-agent on port 80 web traffic, since everything else goes through without a hitch. This doesn't always work, depending on what how the site you're visiting behaves.

Hope that helps!