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iOS 5 Bug? Free Tethering/Personal Hotspot

Hummer

Hummer

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 3, 2006
1,012
0
Queens, New York NY-5
I've had iOS 5 Beta installed on my Verizon iPhone since Monday, when it was released.

I only recently noticed that I now have Bluetooth + USB Tethering and Personal Hotspot enabled on my phone. I do not have these features applied to my account, and when I attempt to turn them on, I am not prompted to contact my carrier. I have tried tethering today to see if the tethering does indeed function and it does.

Has anyone else seen this? I've asked around and I've only had responses from people with AT&T iPhones saying that nothing has changed in that respect for them.

PWilt.png

HuL5U.png
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/534.32 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

I too am able to do this on verizon
 
Personal hotspot did not work on my iphone ios5.
This (and battery life) is the main reason I reverted back to 4.3.3.
It let me turn the tethering (via personal hotspot) on but no other computer would recognise the new wireless iphone network.
ios5 bug number 4578754.
 
Hummer said:
I've had iOS 5 Beta installed on my Verizon iPhone since Monday, when it was released.

I only recently noticed that I now have Bluetooth + USB Tethering and Personal Hotspot enabled on my phone. I do not have these features applied to my account, and when I attempt to turn them on, I am not prompted to contact my carrier. I have tried tethering today to see if the tethering does indeed function and it does.

Has anyone else seen this? I've asked around and I've only had responses from people with AT&T iPhones saying that nothing has changed in that respect for them.

Image
Image
Click to expand...

Why doesn't your status bar say Verizon? Is that an option without jailbreak now?
 
Yes, it's fully active on my Verizon iPhone as well. This tells me that it's strictly a software thing (i.e. no real verizon interaction needed to activate the personal hotspot feature, other than verification that they're stealing $20/mo from you). I would suspect an enterprising hacker should be able to do a diff between this version, and a future version that does require the $20/mo option and see what to fix to enable wifi hotspot through the built-in tool.

Doc
 
Hummer said:
I've had iOS 5 Beta installed on my Verizon iPhone since Monday, when it was released.

I only recently noticed that I now have Bluetooth + USB Tethering and Personal Hotspot enabled on my phone. I do not have these features applied to my account, and when I attempt to turn them on, I am not prompted to contact my carrier. I have tried tethering today to see if the tethering does indeed function and it does.

Has anyone else seen this? I've asked around and I've only had responses from people with AT&T iPhones saying that nothing has changed in that respect for them.

Image
Image
Click to expand...

iOS 5 is loaded on my iPhone 4 with AT&T - no luck with personal hotspot, its not listed in the settings/network area - its simply not there. Any ideas on hot to activate this menu in the first place? I called AT&T to have them provision my acct for it - it should have activated that way, but it hasn't, any ideas? Thanks
 
Wonder if Verizon plans to one-up AT&T and offer free tethering with iOS 5???





...lol, not a chance. They collude with AT&T, they don't compete with them.
 
If it's a bug it's very specific. I get prompted trying to set up the personal hotspot in 5. Hmm, notice that all of us on AT&T don't get this for now... sigh.
 
pmz said:
Wonder if Verizon plans to one-up AT&T and offer free tethering with iOS 5???





...lol, not a chance. They collude with AT&T, they don't compete with them.
Click to expand...

That would be unethical and violate the anti-trust act. And we know AT&T has NEVER done such a thing like that right? :D:rolleyes:;)
 
I found that tethering is now greyed out on my gf's iPhone 4 on Telus (she has 500mb of data) while previously one could use it...
 
This behavior is controlled by the carrier file. During the ios4 beta, some enterprising developers provided a carrier file that left tethering on with out ATT's support even on the final version. The only problem was that in most cases your voice mail stopped working. I'd bet that some Verizon people will notice this at some point soon and it will be back as normal. But it does work for now.

Personally, I'm turning on tethering with VZ next week anyway, so to insure that they do not have that excuse to take away my unlimited data,al la ATT.
 
tdar said:
This behavior is controlled by the carrier file. During the ios4 beta, some enterprising developers provided a carrier file that left tethering on with out ATT's support even on the final version. The only problem was that in most cases your voice mail stopped working. I'd bet that some Verizon people will notice this at some point soon and it will be back as normal. But it does work for now.

Personally, I'm turning on tethering with VZ next week anyway, so to insure that they do not have that excuse to take away my unlimited data,al la ATT.
Click to expand...

Well there's no way I'm adding the $20/mo tethering feature and keeping it on my account just to avoid losing Unlimited data. I only use the tethering occasionally - certainly not enough to justify $20/mo. So I'm hoping you'll still be able to add/remove the feature without affecting the grand-fathered Unlimited data plan. Otherwise, I guess I guess I'll have to go back to my Jailbreak. Ironically, I don't mind paying for tethering when I use it. But taking away the choice to add/remove the feature when you need it would be a deal-breaker for me.
 
Doctauri said:
Yes, it's fully active on my Verizon iPhone as well. This tells me that it's strictly a software thing (i.e. no real verizon interaction needed to activate the personal hotspot feature, other than verification that they're stealing $20/mo from you). I would suspect an enterprising hacker should be able to do a diff between this version, and a future version that does require the $20/mo option and see what to fix to enable wifi hotspot through the built-in tool.

Doc
Click to expand...

What you're describing/asking for is what tetherme already does.
 
WAIT.

Verizon charges $20 a month for Personal Hotspot?????

Sweet baby Jesus. Here I am thinking that Canadians always get totally shafted when it comes to this sort of stuff... I get Personal Hotspot included!
 
I'm on AT&T and when I switched the option to "ON" I got this (Check photo).
As far as I know, I'm not subscribed to the tethering plan. Does this happen to anyone else?
 

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It does and has worked for me on vzw iPhone since beta 1. Thanks for 4gb of free tethering!
 
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