PaulDotCom mailing list archives
Re: attwifi ssid
From: Chris Frederick <cdf123 () cdf123 net>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:31:11 -0600
That's strange. I have an attwifi at the mall here, and the 3GS and 4S have never auto connected to it. The only time I have ever connected the 3GS to an attwifi was because I was getting it swapped out at the apple store (dead battery), which was a few hours from home, so when they gave me the new one I connected to one so I could change passwords/keys that were stored on the dead one. I wiped the phone when I got home, never got to try it on the mall attwifi to see if it would auto connect now. One thing it could be, did you get the iPhone from apple? or from att? The sales rep could have connected it to the store's attwifi spot for activation without your knowledge. Other than that, I don't know why some phones would connect, but mine don't. Chris On 01/12/12 16:42, Marshal Graham wrote:
I'm positive that I did not have to initiate the first connection to attwifi. The first time I noticed it was in a McDonald's and I noticed it later at a Sam's Club. I have never "told" my phone to connect to attwifi, it does this automatically. This is pretty well confirmed judging by the number of devices that blindly connect to attwifi and the presence of an Android option to "Automatically connect to an available AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spot." Marshal On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Chris Frederick <cdf123 () cdf123 net> wrote:I have heard of this behavior on the iPhone, and from what I know, if you connect to any wifi the phone will remember the ssid and the mac, if it sees these in the future it will auto connect. But attwifi is different in that it doesn't check the mac, only the ssid is needed. I have seen that if you do _not_ connect to any attwifi, it won't auto connect, you need to initiate the initial connection to one. I would assume that if you tell the phone to delete the connection while it's in range, it will stop auto-connecting. I have a 3GS and a 4S and have tested this a bit. I've never connected my 4S to attwifi, and it's never auto-connected, but I did on the 3GS but I reset the phone before I was in range of a different attwifi spot. Chris On 01/11/12 12:54, Marshal Graham wrote:Here is an issue I just recently became aware of. I did a little research and was not able to discover much related to this. If it's already been discussed, I'll apologize in advance. AT&T smartphones will automatically connect to a ssid of attwifi. Several people have verified this by simply setting a ssid of attwifi with no encryption. We have seen iPhone 4, Android, and Blackberry devices from AT&T connect this way. It was also reported that AT&T 3G iPad/iPad2 devices do this as well. On the Motorola Atrix, the AT&T logo appear to indicate you are connected to an AT&T hot spot. iPhone 3GS does not appear to exhibit this behavior. At least some Android devices do have an option to disable this behavior through the settings menu. Aside from disabling wifi, I cannot find this option on iPhone or Blackberry. To be clear, this is AT&T specific. A little Google searching revealed this from May 2011, http://gobitech.blogspot.com/2011/05/i-recently-decided-to-conduct-little.html, but not much else. Either this is not as much of an issue as I think it might be or it has just been ignored. It would seem to fall into the same category as using a ssid of linksys or Free Public WiFi. This could be a little worse since at least some devices give you an indication you are connecting to a real AT&T hotspot. Anyone have thoughts about this? To make sure I give proper attribution, this was originally pointed out to me by Mark Rupright. Marshal _______________________________________________ Pauldotcom mailing list Pauldotcom () mail pauldotcom com http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com_______________________________________________ Pauldotcom mailing list Pauldotcom () mail pauldotcom com http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com_______________________________________________ Pauldotcom mailing list Pauldotcom () mail pauldotcom com http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
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Current thread:
- Re: attwifi ssid, (continued)
- Re: attwifi ssid James Philput (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Marshal Graham (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Robin Wood (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid James Philput (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid James Philput (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Bruce Barnett (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Marshal Graham (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Joshua Wright (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Marshal Graham (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Chris Frederick (Jan 11)
- Re: attwifi ssid Marshal Graham (Jan 12)
- Re: attwifi ssid Kevin Shaw (Jan 12)
- Re: attwifi ssid Chris Frederick (Jan 13)
- Re: attwifi ssid James Philput (Jan 13)
- Re: attwifi ssid James Philput (Jan 13)
- Re: attwifi ssid Marshal Graham (Jan 13)
- Re: attwifi ssid Marshal Graham (Jan 12)