A developer has accidentally enabled USB tethering with a beta of Apple’s new iPhone OS 3.0. The feature appears to work, so it is just up to the carriers to determine whether they can handle the load when iPhone OS 3.0 is expected to ship this summer.
USB tethering—where a cell phone is used as a modem for a computer—is one of the most-requested features for the iPhone, and (half of) it has finally arrived in iPhone OS 3.0. Scott Forstall, Apple’s Senior VP of iPhone Software, stated on Tuesday that the feature is now built into the OS, but carriers will have to choose whether to take on all that extra network burden and allow access. As developers continue to tinker with the iPhone OS 3.0 beta, though, one has unlocked access to iPhone tethering and taken it for a spin.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has posted screenshots of his adventures in iPhone tethering to his Twitter account. Unfortunately, Steve has no idea how he did it, only tweeting that he was hacking around with APNs in the Carrier.bundle itcc file. Steve says the feature appears in the Network section of the Settings app, but while “tethering over USB seems to work,” it tends to cause a hard-reboot of the phone. Steve is in Ireland using O2, and testing over Bluetooth is next.
It is worth reiterating that the ability to tether an iPhone for data is not a technical challenge; it’s a network challenge. You probably heard that the iPhone is responsible for bringing AT&T practically to its knees this past week at SXSW in Austin, TX, and that’s just from tiny bits of mobile sites and the like. Computers can haul far more data down a connection, and many carriers are simply not ready to provide that large of a wireless pipe to 17 million iPhone owners yet.
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