I'm not sure I should blog about this in case AT&T finds out but I enabled tethering on my iPhone. Even though Apple made this feature available in iPhone OS 3.0, AT&T has not yet enabled the feature for iPhones on their network. (I'm not telling how I did it, but it was easy, I didn't jailbreak, and AT&T probably didn't want me to do it until they figure out how to charge extra for it.)
I went to the beach the other day but had some work I needed to get done on the way. I plugged my iPhone into my laptop with the normal USB cable and flicked the slider to start tethering. My laptop automatically created a new network interface and I was online.
It probably would have been a battery drained but I have a car power adapter for my laptop.
I was very impressed with both how easy it was to configure – essentially no user config necessary – and how well it performed.
3G on my laptop surfed the web, downloaded files, sync'd my documents and got my email very well. File downloads ran at about 80Kbs. Web pages loaded quickly.
In fact, the experience was significantly better than using a hotspot at Panera or Starbucks. It was even better than I remember using one of those $100 USB 3G dongles.
I don't have an iPhone 3GS so in theory it could be even better using the faster 3G network.
It worked great in the car – it even worked in rural areas on the Edge network but was much slower (obviously).
Assuming AT&T doesn't over charge for this feature, I will be adding it to my account when officially available.
