Schedule A

My iPhone tethering story begins a few months ago when someone from Fido called me to ask me if I would be interested in a super convenient 3G USB modem to connect my laptop to the cellular network for a cost of about $30 a month. I asked him why would I do that if I have an iPhone data plan already which give me 6 GB for $30 a month, which about 2 orders of magnitude more than I actually use a month. I thought the only reason was it would be against my contract, but the guy from Fido told me it wasn’t against the term of service, and if I googled it I could find a YouTube video explaining how to turn on tethering on my phone. That is, despite not being officially supported, tethering wasn’t precluded.

I found a Fido employee telling this strange to say the least, but I looked it up and I found there are urls you can go to with your iPhone the which will attempt to install a small configuration file on your iPhone. All you had to do is say it is trust this one small piece of unsigned code, and bang, you get the ability to turn on tethering. You don’t even have to jail break your phone! The trick is that the iPhone OS as of version 2 (I think) supported tethering natively, it just happens to be disabled. My iPhone OS was at version 2.x, I had tethering, all was well in the world.

Then came the update to iPhone OS version 3.x. I was excited to get some shiny new features so I bought in, hook line and sinker. Shortly after installing I noticed my ability to tether was gone. I looked around for some fixes, but there were none which worked. The update prevented the installation of unsigned configuration files under certain conditions, and the dream of tethering with Fido was dead.

I was willing to wait until the next hack. Something would appear that would let me use the device I bought from Fido in a way which they didn’t disallow. But then something surprising happened. Tethering starting to work again.

It is hard to me to be sure why tethering started working again, but based on the time it happened, I have an interesting theory. At the beginning of October I took a trip to The Netherlands to attend my brother’s PhD. defence. While in The Netherlands, I kept my data roaming off, but used my international roaming a bit. I synced to the local 3G network there. When I got back to Canada I noticed that tethering was working again. My theory is that being on a far more permissive network like the one in The Netherlands allowed the unsigned piece of configuration to take hold again.

So there is an easy fix to the Canadian iPhone OS 3.x tethering woes. Fly to The Netherlands. It will only cost several hundred dollars.

From now on, I am not going to update my iPhone unless I know there is a tethering solution. I wish didn’t have to worry and my carrier just allowed me to tether. Hear that Fido… I just want to be able to tether.

Tether.