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Trick AT&T to Give You Free WiFi At Any of Their Hotspots

Posted in Random by Dan at 10:20 am

Today AT&T announced that they are offering free WiFi to all iPhone users.

AT&T’s iPhone website (under ‘Plans’ tab) has been updated to reveal that each iPhone plan now includes access to their “more than 17,000 Wi-Fi hotspots, including Starbucks all for use in the U.S.”

Now I find it hardly fair that AT&T offers free WiFi to only iPhone users, so here is a work around to allow you to get free wifi no matter what AT&T device you have.

To trick AT&T you have to change your browsers User Agent. If you use FireFox download User Agent Switcher (UAS) to start the process.

Then you need to alter the UAS settings (Tools - User Agent Switcher - Options - Options - User Agents - Add) to the following:

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Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

(Make sure all of that is on one line)

and if you have a Mac in Safari 3.0 in the Preferences, Select Advanced and check the “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. A new menu item called “Develop” should appear in the menu bar. Click on that menu and select “User Agent” and then select the sub option “Mobile Safari 1.1.3 - iPhone”.

With the user agent now switched you will be directed to a landing page designed just for AT&T iPhones where AT&T is asking your for your iPhones phone number. Put in any VALID AT&T number and you will be granted free and unlimited Wifi on your laptop.

Enjoy!

3 Comments, Comment or Trackback

  1. Marc

    Im sure many readers will already know this, but changing your user agent can cause some websites to behave differently that you are used to. In this case, reporting back as an iPhone may cause some websites to take you to their mobile interface rather than the “normal” interface. Other sites may block your access completely if they are only setup to accept IE/FF browsers.

    Not a reason to skip the hack completly, but if you start getting behavior you didnt expect, it could be related to the webserver response to the changed user agent.

    May 8th, 2008

  2. Dave

    How exactly is it ‘hardly fair’ for AT&T to only offer free wifi to the people that pay for AT&T plans and coverage? This is just stealing, don’t act like there’s some sort of honor in it.

    May 10th, 2008

  3. Kai Davis

    How does this behave if the user has an ipod touch? Does it work ‘out of the box’ or is free WiFi really only enabled for the iphone user?

    May 10th, 2008

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