You probably already know that AT&T isn’t a fan of unofficial iPhone tethering, and they are now auto-updating accounts to paid tethering plans when they detect an iPhone users unauthorized tethering activity. There has been a lot of debate and speculation on how AT&T detects the unofficial iPhone tethering. AndroidPolice has provided some insight into how AT&T is able to identify users who are using the unofficial tethering option. How AT&T Detects Unofficial Tethering from the iPhone? Apparently it’s very easy to detect from iPhone users, as AndroidPolice explains: 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. Some tethering applications for iOS make use of alternative methods and route tethered traffic through the phone’s normal data APN, but by and large, most jailbreakers stick with the stock application because it’s easy to use and doesn’t require any complicated setup. In fact, many iPhone users jailbreak for the sole purpose of avoiding AT&T’s tethering fees (for why, see next section). These are the people AT&T’s is going after. According to Android Police, popular jailbreak apps such as MyWi and Tetherme use the tethering APN instead of using the normal data APN. AT&T cross-checks these user accounts to see if they’re paying for a tethering plan. It’s that simple. Hiding Unofficial iPhone Tethering Usage, or, How to Be Like an Android User: In order to understand how users will hide their tethering usage, we have to understand why unofficial tethering on Android isn’t taking the same heat from AT&T as iPhone users. Again AndroidPolice explains: Android tethering, on the other hand, isn’t set up to route data through an alternate APN when the phone is in tethering mode – meaning AT&T would actually have to scan packets to determine whether or not you’re tethering. This requires diversion of AT&T’s resources (read: money), while identifying iPhone tethering is markedly simpler (read: cheap). Because of this, AndroidPolice suggests that Android users may never have to worry about paying the unofficial tethering fee, because easy to detect Apple iPhone users dominate the AT&T subscriber base making them a more cost effective target. In other words, if you don’t want AT&T to know you’re using an unofficial tethering app, you have to hide this by behaving more like an Android tethering app and not using the alternate APN’s. Currently, this ability is limited to the newest version of PDANet, which has a “Hide Usage” option in the app. If PdaNet’s solution works then we’re quite sure that other developers will soon release an updated version of their jailbreak apps to stay ahead of the cat and mouse game with AT&T. It is unfortunate that carriers are charging users for the tethering option or don’t allow some features or apps to work to use iPhone’s 3G data connection (work only over Wi-Fi). Ideally, we should be able to use the data the way we want as we’ve paid for it. Share your thoughts on this with us in the comments section below, and as usual, stay tuned for more news and info by following us on Facebook, Twitter and/or by subscribing to our RSS Feed. Authors:

to know more click here