Support long overdue

AT&T's planned tethering support for the iPhone might not arrive until 2010, a a statement from a carrier spokesman suggests. Responding to a claim that tethering would arrive before the end of the year, the spokesman insists that no one at AT&T has ever made such as promise. "We promised MMS by end of summer and ended up being a few days late for that," the statement adds.

Last November, AT&T mobile head Ralph de la Vega said that tethering would be coming "soon." The feature was enabled in many countries with the release of the iPhone 3.0 firmware in June, but remains out of reach for Americans; other AT&T representatives have indicated that the carrier is worried about overloaded network traffic, which is already suffering under the strain of regular iPhone data. More recently the company has admitted to needing "additional fine tuning to our systems and networks" before tethering can be implemented.

by MacNN Staff