How To Get Personal Hotspot Working On New Aussie iPad Right Now Without Jailbreaking


One of the promised features of the new iPad was that it’d support Personal Hotspot, but here in Australia, the feature’s been notably absent. Here’s how to enable it — no jailbreak required.

Huge, huge thanks to Dean for pointing this out. He’d discovered it while trying to change the carrier logo on his iPad. Previous iPads and iPhones would let you do this via an .ipcc file, but the new iPad seems to block it.

That’s not a whole lot of fun, but what is fun — and I’ve just done this to the office iPad, so I can confirm it works — is that trying to change the carrier logo (which you can do without any form of jailbreaking) somehow enables the personal hotspot mode.

Disclaimer: This obviously isn’t an official Apple procedure, may well be a bug that’ll get patched over, and in any case you proceed AT YOUR OWN RISK. Now, on with the show.

The whole process is, frankly, stupendously simple. Dean was using an ipcc file from Beau Giles’ web site, here to try to change his logo. It didn’t work, but the instructions do. Basically, what you need to do is download an .ipcc file from Beau’s site, and follow the instructions there:

For both Mac OS X and Windows, make sure iTunes is closed before proceeding.

For Mac OS X; open up Terminal.app and paste in the following

defaults write com.apple.itunes carrier-testing -bool true

For Windows, open up Run (Winkey+R) and paste the following;

“%ProgramFiles%\iTunes\iTunes.exe” /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1


If you’re running Windows x64 bit, do this instead:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunes.exe” /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1

Done! Now simply connect your iPhone, open up iTunes, select your iPhone from the sidebar, and hold down option (Windows users, hold down Shift instead) while you click on restore. Now simply point your way to the .ipcc file you wish to load. You may also want to repeat the above, but click on ‘Check for Updates’ instead.

Now once that is finished, reboot your iPhone and you should be good to go.

What’s what’s meant to happen for the carrier logo update, but it doesn’t actually change the logo — or at least hasn’t as far as I can see. Rebooting the office iPad once brought up the hotspot function that was previously absent, but greyed out.

Rebooting it one more time got it up and working. I’ve connected a few devices to it, and it definitely works. There’s no telling whether this is a quirk that’ll be quashed quickly or not, but if you bought a new iPad with the expectation of using it as a hotspot, it’s very useful to have — especially as the new iPad’s connection speeds are markedly better than the original model.


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