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Tethering Question

jmitch150

jmitch150

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 15, 2009
153
3
Boston, MA
If I use help.benm.at/usa.php to change my carrier profile so I can enable tether should I go undetected by AT&T? I only plan to use tethering occasionally on my laptop when I'm without wifi. Is there any risk that I will get charged by AT&T? Will they be able to tell I changed the settings?

Thanks for any help you guys can give.
 
I have been wondering the exact same thing! Hopefully someone on here will chime in with so e good information for us!
 
As far as I know as long as it is not abused AT&T will not know the difference between tethering data and regular iPhone data.

If there is a big spike in your data usage, thats what will make red flags go up.
 
Read!!!

Read the tethering guide in this forum!!!!! Reason is the 3.0.0 tethering feature has some tattle-tale signs on the packets it send between your Mac/PC-iPhone-Cell Network=BIG BILL!!!!!!
OUCH!!!!!!
 
Tundraboy said:
Read the tethering guide in this forum!!!!! Reason is the 3.0.0 tethering feature has some tattle-tale signs on the packets it send between your Mac/PC-iPhone-Cell Network=BIG BILL!!!!!!
OUCH!!!!!!
Click to expand...

So what are the packets that are being used to tattle?

Until someone offers some proof of what's actually being done to notify AT&T that you're tethering - instead of some random post on the Internet - it's just paranoia and speculation.

Now, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that someone's not out to get you. :D

dt
 
When tethering using 3.0 you will notice your data usage in settings/ general/ usage/ is not accumulating. That packet of info is sent to your carrier and not logged in your phone. It's a way for them to keep track of your usage and keep it seperate from the data the iPhone is using on its own. Do you honestly think your carrier is going to give you tethering for free?
 
I've downloaded about 2gb of files using tethering feature. Notthing from AT&T yet and I hope never.
 
Give it time when the carriers figure out there tethering plans you will be charged for your usage. You can bet 3.0 built in tethering has the ability built in to snitch on you. Here in Canada on Rogers we have tethering for free until Dec 31 after which we will be charged based on our usage. So based on what Rogers says they will know how much data you use when tethering, using 3.0 methods. Jailbreaking is another story.
 
i don't think its paranoia to think that att could be tracking our tethering usage. its been proven that apple can't hide features on the iphone without the hacker being able to enable them later (emoji/mms/tethering). its only logical that apple would design the tethering feature with the ability to track usage built in. i am holding out hope that the jailbreak community will be able to disable this somehow. there is also the possibility that apple thinks the same way we do and wants tethering to be included in our current plans at no extra cost. if that was true they might not care if people hack their phones to go around att and activate tethering but i doubt this.
 
Unless the tethering app snitches on you using the cell phone side, it's not sending anything. At least nothing that good ol' tcpdump is picking up.

I had it running on the phone yesterday before, during and after a tethering session and there was nothing aside from NTP queries, exchange stuff and dns lookups.

dt
 
Tundraboy said:
Read the tethering guide in this forum!!!!! Reason is the 3.0.0 tethering feature has some tattle-tale signs on the packets it send between your Mac/PC-iPhone-Cell Network=BIG BILL!!!!!!
OUCH!!!!!!
Click to expand...

No it doesn't.
 
I decided to remove the built-in tethering feature with carrier settings hack. I do think Apple would have built-in a snitch so AT&T can track how many MB of data people are using so they can charge. I am going back to PDANet via Jailbreak. I've used it for months and not a peep from AT&T. Too bad PDANet is not as easy to turn on as the built-in option. :(
 
Tundraboy said:
When tethering using 3.0 you will notice your data usage in settings/ general/ usage/ is not accumulating. That packet of info is sent to your carrier and not logged in your phone. It's a way for them to keep track of your usage and keep it seperate from the data the iPhone is using on its own. Do you honestly think your carrier is going to give you tethering for free?
Click to expand...

I use Fido 5.0 (canada) files and the data IS accumulating in settings/general/usage.
But maybe for At&t it's a different story.
 
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