After patiently waiting for weeks and weeks, I finally got a chance to download the new iPhone 3.0 firmware today.  I’ve been very interested in the tethering feature and I was pretty disappointed to find out that AT&T wasn’t going to be supporting this feature. You might remember one of my first posts about an iPhone app called NetShare. I’ve been using NetShare to tether on my iPhone 3G for over a year now. It’s a great app, but it’s truly a pain to setup each time I want to use it.

I found out today (just around 1pm EST when the 3.0 firmware was released) that there is a way to enable the tethering feature, even on AT&T! After work I decided to give it a try and sure enough, it worked! There is a catch however…

Here are the steps (found at: http://gist.github.com/131425):

Update your iPhone to the 3.0 release and make sure iTunes is version 8.2

Download this dmg and mount it: tethering file

Enable hidden carrier testing option (in Terminal.app): defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

Start up iTunes

Go to you iPhone’s summary page

Option-Click the Restore button

Select the ATT_US.ipcc file from your mounted dmg (step 3)

Open Settings -> General -> Network -> Internet Tethering on your iPhone and switch it ON

When your computer is connected via USB you will see a dialog to open network preferences. Open it and hit apply.

The guide states that this might break Visual Voicemail… and sure enough, it does! Once I completed these steps I was unable to receive voicemails on my phone. And since voicemail > tethering for most people, here’s the suggested way to fix it.

Connect your iPhone and fire up iTunes

Option-click on the Restore button like you did before

Navigate to [your-username]/Library/iTunes/iPhone Carrier Support

Click on the file in there to reset your carrier settings

So I tried this fix and immediately a voicemail showed up. Great, it’s fixed! Not quite. Now my “Internet Tethering” option eventually goes away from the Network Settings page. Ughh. It seems like you can do either Voicemail or Tethering. I plan to do some more research and I’ll keep this post updated with anything new I find.