iPhone = Free Wi-Fi
Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 01
Exclusive U.S. iPhone reseller, AT&T, is supposedly offering buyers of the Apple gadgets a really sweet deal: iPhone users can access all AT&T Wi-Fi locations for free. Strangely, when I asked AT&T to confirm this this morning, the company issued a “no comment.”
Here’s my question: Can you still access AT&T’s hotspots for free if you’d purchased an unlocked iPhone, from a carrier/company other than AT&T? Supposedly, to access AT&T hotspots, users only need to key in their iPhone numbers, so I wonder if AT&T is blocking use by non-AT&T iPhone users. Do you know what the situation is?
Reader Comments
Steve Wildstrom
May 1, 2008 01:26 PM
My guess is that this works by sniffing the browser and if the user agent string shows Mobile Safari, you're in. That means it would work with iPhones and probably iPod Touches. It's not real hard to hack the user agent string on a laptop to misidentify your browser, so I imagine they'll find a way to shut that down.
Steve Wildstrom
May 3, 2008 08:20 PM
Engadget and Gizmodo both report that the free iPhone Wi-Fi has disappeared, at least for the moment.
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