MYWI and tethering on At&T

[alexxxps]

My iPhone is jailbroken, and i've been using mywi to connect my laptop online. Will AT&T detect this and add a charge? I only use like 1gb a month in data and am always careful not to go over. I searched the forum and couldn't find a thread answering this exact question. Thanks!!!

[kraziebone]

In the past they haven't done anything about it but now tethering is an official addition to the plans, I have wondered if they will begin monitoring tethering as well. I once read that it's definately within their capability so that makes me a little nervous. I just don't want AT&T to add tethering to my plan when they notice and therefore I would lose my unlimited data plan

[DJM AutoWerkz]

I use about 3gb a month of data just on my
iPhone nonterhering so
I'm sure they can't the difference.

[StealthBravo]

It hasn't been an issue

[philo]

Bump. Have we heard or seen anything new regarding if AT&T is doing anything to spoil our MyWi fun?

[sunshinejenn03]

I read something recently that now that AT&T has tethering enabled, the iPhone uses a different APN to access that data, so they'll be able to tell if you are tethering or not. I'll see if I can find the info again.

[MexiChriS]

I read something recently that now that AT&T has tethering enabled, the iPhone uses a different APN to access that data, so they'll be able to tell if you are tethering or not. I'll see if I can find the info again.

Woah, please do try to resource that info, that would really help me & my friend out. As well as others I'd assume.

[sunshinejenn03]

tethering and iOS 4 - Page 2 - Hackint0sh

This wasn't my original resource...I don't remember what I was doing or where I happened upon on it, so I'm having a hard time finding it, but this pretty much explains it. Post number 17 on that link, but I'll quote it here, too.

From the start Apple's tethering implementation was designed to work in 2 modes:

a) Without requiring the use to purchase a special tethering plan. This mean that the same data plan will work for the both the iPhone data needs and tethering.

b) By requiring the user to sign up for a special tethering data plan.

This is up to the carrier to do it and it's controlled by the way the APNs are setup in the carrier bundle.

In the particular case of AT&T, they have defined one APN for "iPhone data" and one APN for tethering. If the user does not have a "tethering plan", then when tethering starts the iPhone will attempt to authenticate with the second APN and it will fail (the line is not provisioned to use the special APN). It's a very simple and effective method of squeezing a few extra bucks from the "unfortunate" users.

But do not despair. As Daniel Borca already posted, all it requires is that CommCenter be patched to ignore the per-APN signatures. The objective of the patch is to allow the APNs to be fully configurable by a user provied carrier-bundle. This will allow many things to be done.

But be careful: changing / bypassing carrier mandated tethering mechanism may not be legal in some countries/jurisdictions. It may be a breach of contract and may be grounds for contract termination. And the answer is yes, the carrier has ways of finding that one is using tethering without a proper plan, using very simple user bandwidth usage profiling.
And for those with AT&T new plans, the good old days of real unlimited data are long gone.