iPhone internet tethering for dummies

Tethering an iPhone to your OS X based laptop is a trivial, 5 minute task. Nevertheless, most of the instructions you’ll find skip over a few small but critical details. Here’s the play-by-play:

0. Make sure you have iPhone OS 3.0 installed.

1. Using Safari on your iPhone, visit http://help.benm.at/help.php

2. Click on ‘Mobile Configs’ and navigate to your appropriate country and carrier (United States > AT&T). Download this file.

3. Reboot your iPhone.

4. Open the ‘Settings’ app on your iPhone and navigate to General>Network. Turn ‘Internet Tethering’ On.

You can now share your iPhone’s internet connection with other devices using either a USB connection or Bluetooth. Any questions? Fire away in the comments.

Is this legal? Will your carriers mess with you? Another blog post for another person.

UPDATE: Many users (myself included) lost visual voicemail functionality as a result of the tethering hack. I found a solution on this blog post that has restored VVM and allows you to continue tethering. Please let me know if this is confusing in the comments and I’ll be happy to expand.