iPhone 3G Coming To A Laptop Near You Soon

Usually phone tethering has long been a marketing point for floor salesmen to push, extending the mantra of having the Internet in your pants to what’s on your lap but that’s all been thrown out the window with the iPhone. Beyond the multi touch gestures, next generation operating system and whatever talking points easily memorized by a sales clerk, having the Internet extend to something, a little bigger, was always a sore spot with AT&T and Apple. No more says Ralph De La Vega, CEO of AT&T as iPhone tethering is coming “Soon.”

Following the mystique of Apple, not much else was mentioned but the thought of having another core feature common to most phones finally arrive to the iPhone is almost trivial and shouldn’t be news worthy but ironically it is, due to the much noticed absence of it. Jailbroken driven Apps have picked up the slack but required hacking the iPhone 3G. Even though Apple approved Netshare, a data sharing App that allowed for tethering, it was up long enough to be bought by a few lucky customers.

The tidbit given by Ralph to Michael Arrington during the Web 2 summit leaves a lot of questions open and of course won’t be answered until Apple drops a new Firmware revision and all indications of such a thing occurring are absent from the latest Beta seeds of Firmware 2.2 as well as an official mention from Apple. What has yet to be determined is the price tacked on per month for such a luxury, but looking at typical rates, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it somewhere around 30 dollars extra tacked onto the additional 30 dollar data charge for 3G access.

Besides price possibilities, other obstacles that existed in preventing iPhone 3G tethering may have been wiped out or were false claims. As its been said before on AppleStash, AT&T’s still developing 3G roll out and the combination of millions of iPhones hopping on, created a potential bottleneck for the network. The increased consumption of data through phone tethering would’ve created a bigger possible slow down on the network and dropped signals for some which has happened before. Since the iPhone 3G’s launch, AT&T has continued their 3G rollout across the states and hopefully the network has matured to allow for tethering.