Are providers aware of Tethering on iPhone?

[raziiq]

Hi there.

I own an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2 (WiFi) Model. I am planning to use MyWi to tether my iPhone4's 3G internet to use on iPad. i live in japan and my carrier is Softbank and they told me that they dont allow tethering, i was wondering how they get to know that i am tethering??

[cornbrown]

I hear PDA net is able to hide your tethering activity from your carrier.


Sent from my iPhone using ModMyi

[aneagle]

They look at the MAC address.

[raziiq]

How about MyWi?

[jdfwarrior]

It's not the mac address that they look at. I saw an article not too long ago on this and explained how carriers like AT&T were able to detect it.

Snippet from the article:
Jailbroken iPhones typically use the same tethering technique as a standard iPhone, the one that’s already present in iOS. This method exposes tethering activity quite readily, because the iPhone, when in tethering mode, sends traffic through an alternate APN (AT&T access point/router) for the express purpose of identifying the traffic as tethered data. This makes it extremely easy for AT&T to identify whether or not an iOS device is utilizing tethering, and just how much of their data is consumed via tethering.

From what I read, PDANet and one or two other tethering apps avoid this. Last I heard, MyWi doesn't.

Link to original article here

[aneagle]

AT&T carrier.plist is built in order to charge tethering traffic at a particular tariff. Some people are aware of that and change type-mask in carrier.plist to route tethering traffic through a low cost APN where comes the question how AT&T detect and send warning message.

In the case of Softbank, the only type-mask used in carrier.plist is 7 for MMS/VVM/Data, no APN for tethering, all traffic will be through the same APN and the question is how can they detect if tethering is used.

[raziiq]

So the question stands, how Softbank is gonna know someone is tethering?

[aneagle]

So the question stands, how Softbank is gonna know someone is tethering?

Packet inspection will reveal more than one MAC address, the iPhone's and the non-iPhone's.

[raziiq]

I hear PDA net is able to hide your tethering activity from your carrier.


Sent from my iPhone using ModMyi

Have you used it? I heard people saying Pdanet is quite buggy