Here's something that I thought would be trivial to do, because it seems ultimately useful to me, but nothing seems to work this way.

The Background:

I have a mobile phone that included "unlimited data", as long as it's only the mobile phone using it, tethering is strictly forbidden. Now, they've just modified the tariffs so that the one I'm on only includes 1GB of data, it's £2 extra for the unlimited.

Now, I generally use about 250MB per month, so I'm well within this 1GB limit. Now, on the newly modified tariff, tethering is permitted. Great.

However, I am still irked by this nonsense that tethering is bad - especially when you consider that it's all covered under a fair use policy. I could quite happily consume 5GB of data on the phone, but if I wanted to tether my Nexus 7 to it and consume the same about of data as I would on the phone then I'm told that this is unfair and bad.

So, this particular telecoms provider is upping the ante by bringing in new tech to catch tetherers. (I should point out that I've never tethered on them).

Which got me thinking....

Why is it not possible to set up in a WiFi connection in android or on the mac a VPN? That is to say, that on an AP by AP basis I can say whether I want to route data to through a VPN?

So, if I were to create an AP on my phone and configure the Nexus 7 what would be useful is that on the N7 side it would initiate a VPN connection once I've connected to the AP, no data would be allowed over the link until the VPN is up and connected. Same goes for the mac.

Surely I can't be the only person in the world who thinks that this kind of operation is useful?

Adrian