Like a drug dealer passing out free candy at a schoolyard (my longtime friend Phil Henderson claims this is how they get you hooked), AT&T enabled a prototype of its tethering on the iPhone this past June. It wasn’t publicly released; you had to go to a special website to install it. But once you did the effect was amazing and liberating: you could now use your iPhone as a modem to connect your computer to the Internet, just by clicking “enable tethering” in your settings and connecting via Bluetooth or a USB cable.
AT&T undoubtedly plans to make this service official, and charge for it at some point. Assuming they don’t get too greedy, tethering trial users will gladly open their wallets. But the trial tethering went away with finality in iPhone 3.1, the latest software release.
If you religiously respond to Apple’s “an update for your iPhone is available” alerts you are already out of luck. Release 3.1 includes a firmware update that now verifies the iPhone each time you connect to the network (like Microsoft’s Genuine Windows “service”) so if you try to reinitiate tethering it will be immediately disabled. Since this is firmware, the “restore from backup” will not fix it.
If you want to try tethering and you haven’t updated, you might try Googling “enable tethering iPhone 3.0” or some such… just remember you are going to have to pay for it eventually. If you are already on 3.1 you are out of luck.
But if you had previously enabled tethering and now are at 3.1, you are feeling pretty unpopular right now! How do I know? Because you haven’t gotten any new voicemails in days! Well, actually you have but they are hidden. No alerts in the iPhone visual menu when they arrive, and no way to access them and listen to them.
If you have this problem, you might want to Google “restore visual voicemail iPhone 3.1” or some such. For me, what worked was going to Settings>General>Profile, clicking that, then clicking “remove” for the file that is there. (Some have reported the path as Settings>General>Network>Profile; I can’t go back and verify it because once you do this and sync your phone, the “Profile” choice disappears.)
Voila, all your voicemails are back instantly. Including, if you are like me, some action items that are seriously past due. Go ahead and take care of them, you can thank me later.
Oh my gosh!!! Thank you!!! My VVM is back!!! It was driving me crazy, you just saved me from going insane without it. This was exactly the answer I needed. Thank you so much for posting this! You made my day!