I just spoke with an local AT&T rep in my area about when the tethering for an iPhone will be release as a service available for this carrier today (6/8/09). Apparently she said that AT&T Corporate will be announcing latter today their new services for tethering the iPhone. I asked if they had any other data on this but she said they do not. Although she let me know that in about 2 hours from now (currently its 2:00pm EST, so at about 4:00pm EST) we should hear an official announcement in the news about this from AT&T.
Update (6/19/09): It turns out they only released the new iPhone 3GS but I have a feeling they’ll be releasing tethering soon since the new iPhone and the new OS offer tethering
AT&T Rep told me:
“We just got told today by corporate that this will be announced today.”
[I then asked ] When can I expect to hear more data about this?
“You’ll find out [the information] at the same time we find out…
We should know in 2 hours, there will be an announcement all over the news then.”
What is Tethering?
Tethering will allow you to connect your iPhone to your laptop and use your iPhone’s Internet service plan. So you’ll be able to goon the Internet using your iPhone as a pseudo modem.
How I found out about the release?
Yesterday and today I became increasingly curious as to when this service would be made available. As I will be away from my office for a few days and wanted to make sure I have Internet access. Although, I’ve actually investigated this in the past only to find out that you could do it but it would violate your service agreement. So not wanting to do that I researched more on the Internet to see if AT&T would be offering this service anytime soon. I had found that they were set to announce this service at some future data but no hard concrete data was given. Although one website suggested it would be in April. When that has come and past and it was not release. So being desperate I called up my local AT&T store and asked them if that service was available yet. Surprisingly the rep told me that AT&T will actually be announcing this service being available later on today.
How does this effect SEO & the Internet?
I believe this will have at least a slight effect on Internet usage. I think there will at least be a small increase in usage. I know myself for one will be able to be online more. I believe that we can already see that the iPhone by its self has created an increase in Internet usage - even thought its just a mobile Internet usage increase. Although I don’t really see this having much of an effect on SEO or SEO services other than it might make the Internet more available to people thus you might have more people using search engine, etc… But an interesting question with regards to this could be how will this effect Analytics and visitor tracking. Will most Analytics programs track a user as the same user if they are using their iPhone or tethered computer? Once this service is released we’ll have to experiment with that and find out.