I’ve been hanging out for a while for Internet Tethering to be enabled on the iPhone by some of the phone carriers in Australia. Optus allows this but for some reason charges you $10 to use this feature. You can take your SIM Card and put it any other phone though and it is free, but if you put this in the iPhone you have to pay an extra $120 a year just to get the option.

I heard that Virgin? has this enabled for free.

Telstra up until last Saturday, there simply was no option to do this. ZDNet Australia (amongst other news sites) have a post on this if your interesting in the finer details you can check out over here or jump straight to the comment on the Telstra’s forum here.

Now it is enabled it is easy to get working.

1. Plug your iPhone into your PC and open up iTunes
2. If you don’t get prompted to update your carrier settings you will have to do this manually
3. To do this manually, click on your iPhone and click “Check For Updates”
4. It should then prompt you to download these settings, do that and your set.

If your like me though, this didn’t work. I would click on the ‘Set Up Internet Tethering’ option and I would get a prompt telling me to call Telstra or go to their website.

The problem was fairly simple, but out of my control. To get data on the iPhone previously I’ve had to change the APN settings to telstra.wap as telstra.iph didn’t work. Now to check this, if you set your APN settings to telstra.iph (should be this by default) try and browse the internet on the phone. If you can’t do this (like I couldn’t months ago when I first got the iPhone), I manually changed this to telstra.wap as I knew data worked on my previous phone.

After getting a called escalated to level 2 technically support. We tried the basic things and we both couldn’t figure it out until I remembered what I had to do get data to work on the phone. The guy on the phone reset my network profile / enabled the settings and I was then instantly able to browse data on the phone through the telstra.wap APN Carrier setting, and thus when I clicked on setup Internet tethering this just worked.

Now I’ve got the option and the technical staff at telstra can help out the next caller better to. Let me know how you go!

On a side note, OPTUS ? seriously $10 to get this feature enabled. If I went on a <$30 BYO phone plan with you which included 150mb+ data and $150 worth of phone calls. I’m not willing to pay another $10 for nothing! Lift your game. Did I mention your mobile network doesn’t compare to Telstra’s in terms of coverage/speed/performance (as much as it pains me to say it), why would you place greater hurdles upon your users?