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Optus iPhone Tethering – For FREE!

// June 18th, 2009 // General ramblings, Hacks, iPhone

Please note: This hack was patched by Apple in Firmware 3.1.1 and no longer works.

With the official release of the iPhone 3.0 firmware today there has been much talk about the leaked Optus pricing which indicates Tethering will be an account add-on which will cost $9.99 to enable and will require the additional purchase of a data pack ranging from $25 – $45/month. I decided this probably doesn’t need to be so, I mean its not the case in all countries, and most likely not going to be the case with all carriers in Australia either, and why would I pay to use Optus wireless internet when my previous experience has been a total fail.

So here’s the thinking behind this hack, Apple ships the same iPhone to all carriers around the world, when the end user syncs with iTunes their sim code tells iTunes which carrier to load onto the phone, so iTunes contacts Apple’s secret download server (http://phobos.apple.com/version) requesting in this case the Optus carrier profile which contains everything from the Voicemail number, email settings, Optus Zoo URL and internet access point names and passwords.

None of these details are really worth changing, unless you don’t want the Optus Zoo mess on your phone, except the access points (apns), there’s one of these for Internet, MMS, and Visual Voicemail, we need to add one for Tethering or you’ll see this message

The Hack

Prerequisites:

• An iPhone 3G.
• Firmware 3.0 loaded onto said iPhone.
• iTunes 8.2 +
• xCode/iPhone SDK (Optional, but preferred)
• Ability to follow instructions (Optional, but preferred)

This hack is somewhat technical, and you will need to have the xCode developer tools installed on your Mac, or a good XML editor if your on Windows.

You should be able to pull this off in less than 10 mins, just follow these simple instructions.

Step 1

Download the latest Optus carrier profile from Apple, here’s a link

Decompress it and you should end up with a folder called Payload, if your browser didn’t decompress it and your left with Optus_au.ipcc, change the extension to .zip and then decompress.

Inside Payload you’ll find Optus_au.bundle, this is just another folder, if you right click and select ‘Show Package Contents’ we’ll be in business.

Step 2

Inside Optus_au.bundle there is 5 files, the only one we care about is carrier.plist, open this with Property List Editor on OS X or your favourite text editor.

Step 3

Locate the ‘apns’ Array and open it by clicking the disclosure triangle next to the name. Now there should be 4 items inside, the first item is the phones internet settings, we want to duplicate this so that the iPhone thinks we have another profile for Tethering. So copy and paste it into ‘apns’

Now this part is crucial, to force your phone to use this profile over all others, change the ‘type-mask’ attribute on Item 2 from 17 to -2

I’m not sure who came up with the -2 but I found it in an ATT profile and it seems to do the job just fine.

Save this file

Step 4

Close ‘Optus_au.bundle’ and re-compress ‘Payload’ folder

Now rename the output zip file to ‘OptusHacked.ipcc’ make sure you have no trace of the .zip extension or this won’t work.

Step 5 – Load it into iTunes

Open Terminal (Located in Applications/Utilities) and run this command (Copy + Paste it then press enter)

defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

This will tell iTunes to allow custom carrier profiles to be loaded from your hard drive.

Connect your iPhone to iTunes and alt-click (Option + Click) on ‘Check for Update’, this will open a file selection window, locate the OptusHacked.ipcc file we created and open it.

And your done. Restart your iPhone and your in business, you should now see this option when you go into Settings/General/Network on your iPhone if you did it right.

If it still says ‘Setup Internet Tethering’, I’d say you stuffed up on step 3.

I should take this time to point out that this will greatly reduce your battery life, as well as use a lot of data from your plan, if you don’t have much of this data stuff then you could get hit with a pretty big bill from Optus, and unless you live for really big bills, that’s something to worry about.