iPhone 3.0 tethering hack

Tethering an American iPhone should be as equally viable as tethering an Irish one, a developer tells MacNN. While AT&T has not officially opened up tethering in the US, local owners of an iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3.0 beta firmware should be able to hack their phones to use the technology. The process begins by navigating to the "~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Carrier Support" folder, where users must rename an IPCC file as a ZIP document after creating a backup of the original.

The ZIP file is then unpacked to a directory called Payload, where users must edit the info, version and carrier PLIST files. The first two files only require changing the CFBundleVersion variable to 5.0; the carrier file however requires adding a new dictionary to the apns array, with "apn = internet," "password = password" and "username = iphone" as variables. The wap dictionary demands a new pair, entered as "type-mask = (NUMBER) -2," and users may also want to enter a new pair in the top-level dictionary as "AllowEDGEEditing = (BOOLEAN) YES."

The Payload folder must once again be zipped up, and renamed to the title of the original IPCC file. At this point developers can sync an iPhone with iTunes and check for an update, which will allow them to pick their custom IPCC file. After a reboot, tethering should appear as an option in an iPhone's Network settings. Tethering is said to be non-functional for 2G (EDGE) iPhones.

by MacNN Staff