I'm on an MVNO who doesn't care, but the settings for the network the MVNO runs ontop of override it with a different APN. It's times like this I really hate Apple's operator-relationship BS.

I hate how they make it super hard if not impossible to override the APNs yourself... I change carriers every month, and do all sorts of odd stuff with my SIMs, and my iPhone chokes on them because of it :(

My understanding was that you could change them yourself using either the iPhone Configuration Utility or http://www.unlockit.co.nz. Has something changed in that regard?

Tethering APNs and a few other settings (such as LTE enabling) are signed and can't be overridden that way

Good to know, thanks for the info. Is there no way for carriers to apply these settings directly? I know Bell did some tinkering on my iPad when I got a SIM from them while traveling in Canada, but I don't know if it was anything more advanced than what the user can access.

>I change carriers every month

I'd be surprised if there were more than a handful of people actually doing this, which would explain why your use case doesn't get substantial engineering/UX resources.

They don't need any engineering/UX, they just need to stop locking down all the settings. Android and every dumbphone I ever owned had no problems with this.

Are the settings locked down or do they just not exist? Apple would have to create and test the interface, make sure it's not possible to disable your device with it, etc. Which is a small thing, but easy to miss when there's no obvious need for it (except, of course, a few edge cases).

Of course my use case is very much and edge case, but if they just let me have access to the damned settings it wouldn't be a problem. It's my one gripe with my iPhone

> I change carriers every month

Is this because of travel and being in a different country?

Can you elaborate? How can they detect this other than using methods such as looking at your user-agent or TTL, both of which could be controlled on a jail-broken device?

The traffic patterns of a mobile phone and a desktop computer are very different, even if all you do is browsing.

To my knowledge this is usually because the server responds to the browser's user-agent and serves content appropriate for the mobile device. If you override the user-agent and mimic a desktop browser, how would the traffic pattern be different then?

EDIT: I meant to state if you were to override the desktop's user-agent to mimic a mobile device while tethered.

An iOS device making periodic requests to https://*.update.microsoft.com might be one of many red flags.