AT&T won't bad-mouth tethering workaround

Though AT&T won't officially give you a way to use your iPhone to tether your laptop to an internet connection, it is looking the other way while an iPhone enthusiast has created a workaround.

Good thing too, now that Apple accounts for more than two thirds of all mobile traffic in the United States. According to stats released by AdMob and reported on by Electronista , in April iPhone requests accounted for 59 percent of mobile web traffic. In May? A whopping 69 percent. BlackBerries were 13 percent and Android 7 percent.  And that was before the new iPhones came out, even.


So the workaround posted by Austrian blogger Benjamin Miller (his site's all in German) comes none too soon.

The good folks at PCMag.com managed to translate the directions on how to get to the tethering workaround, though, which is usable whether you connect your phone to the laptop via USB or Bluetooth:

To access, go to help.benm.at/help.php on your iPhone, and a mobile site created by Miller will pop up. Scroll down to "Tethering & Internet Settings" and click download. Select your country and then your provider and an install button will appear.

Once installed, return to the home page, and go to Settings > General > Network > Internet tethering. Turn on tethering and a pop-up window will let you choose between Bluetooth and USB only.

If you're using a USB, plug it into your Mac or PC and the computer will auto-detect the iPhone. Select your connection and you should be online.

AT&T wouldn't give an official thumb up to Miller's workaround, but also, notably, refused to say anything bad about it.

"We do not yet offer tethering on the iPhone ... [and] we do not guarantee the performance of any app we don't offer," AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel told PCMag.com.  AT&T does, however, support tethering on the BlackBerry.

Outside the U.S., the iPhone and iPod Touch have snagged 50 percent of mobile requests, according to AdMob, while Nokia's Symbian phones dropped to 32 percent, BlackBerry to 7 percent and Windows Mobile to 4 percent.

AT&T says it will offer tethering on the iPhone ... sometime.

AT&T can't badmouth tethering, they're too busy charging Adam Savage $11,000 for use of his USB modem while he was in Canada. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/mythbuster-adam-savage-leads-twitter-revolt-against-att)

Turns out they can't do math: They thing 0.015 cents per kb = 1.5 cents per kb. I remember hearing a recording where Verizon screwed up the same way, years ago.

Luckily for Adam, he's not one of us normal peons, and his 50k Twitter fans got AT&T's attention.