iPhone tethering app – converts your iPhone to act as a personal Wi-Fi hotspot!
This is an app that can do exactly that, albeit with some tinkering in the menus first. This is advertised as an app that is a simple file manager and file viewer. Well, it may be those, but that is not all. It also shares a 3G connection. It Takes Some Searching If you are good with some exploration, you can hook up another mobile device, or whatever, to internet using your iPhone as the source of a signal. Other apps like this have come and gone before in the Apple iTunes store. This one is likely not going to be there for long, but the fact remains, it works.
Some of the more blatant tries at promoting a tethering app, like one called “iTether“, have been in the app store for just a few days. It may seem obvious to you with a name like “iTether“, that there is no way it could be approved, but humans (Apple employees) are far from perfect. These Beguiling Apps Pop Up Regularly Some other iPhone tethering apps that managed to get approved in the iTunes store are “Payupsucker” and “HandyLight“.
These were set up with built in features to allow iPhone tethering using either Wi-Fi or bluetooth. They were jerked from the digital shelves in a short amount of time after it was discovered what they could really do.
iPhone Tethering App for a Mobile Hotspot…
iTether for the iPhone is an app that allows you to tether to a laptop or home computer using your mobile data plan without paying your mobile carrier an extra fee monthly. The app runs $14.99 and is a one time fee. Historically apps like these never made it to the iTunes app store so you may want to give this one a bit of time in case Apple takes it down. Another reason to hold off a bit is because so many people have been accessing this app the servers at tether.com have been overloaded and problems accessing the app have been reported. The price beats out AT&T’s current tethering plan tremendously. I pay an extra $20 a month for tethering so that I can have internet access anywhere with my laptop whether it be for a client or work. It is a huge convenience and a one time fee would save me hundreds. Lets hope this one stays in the app store and continues its low cost.
Take a look for yourself. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/itether/id477971193?mt=8
***Update
Well it seems that the link above gives a message that the iTether app is not available in the USA store. After a little more research its seems that you can download this from your iPhone but most cell carriers forbid you to use tethering without their permission, being that you have to buy their tethering plan. If you don’t currently have a tethering plan I would recommend buying this app and using it as long as it lasts because the price is still less than the cost of buying your carriers tethering plan for just one month.
AT&T’s Unauthorized iPhone Tethering Crackdown Gets Detailed
In March, AT&T began cracking down on customers it believed were jailbreaking their iPhones and using “unauthorized” apps to tether data for no extra fee. Text messages were sent out to suspected customers with an ultimatum: Stop tethering, or we’ll automatically enroll you in our $45 DataPro plan.
The folks over at Android Police point out that jailbroken iPhones are easy to pinpoint when tethered, because many tethering apps use the same technique as the one inherent in iOS. When tethered, the iPhone “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.”
The customers AT&T is likely targeting most are those with the grandfathered unlimited data plans. They can tether their hearts out, without worrying about going over their allotted data cap.
IPhoneDownloadBlog has a list of iPhone tethering apps. MyWi, the most popular one, uses the same APN as the iPhone’s standard tethering system, so it is not recommended if you want to go undetected. Two other alternatives are PdaNet – which offers a “hide” function — and TetherMe.
However, some users in the comments section of iPhoneDownloadBlog are saying that even with the updated versions of these tethering apps with hiding functionality enabled can’t escape AT&T’s wrath.
“I used the new PDANET since the day it was released a few weeks ago,” wrote one commenter. “Shortly after and consistent with 4.3 upgrade I received an email from AT&T.”
So perhaps no one is safe anymore when it comes to unauthorized tethering on the iPhone.
How to tether your iPhone with your Laptop..
AT&T finally allows internet tethering on the iPhone. This lets you share your iPhone’s internet connection so you can surf the web wherever you have a cell phone signal. This will definitely be useful for any mobile real estate professionals that need internet access but are not close to a Wi-Fi hotspot.