attwifi ssid

[Marshal Graham <marshal.graham () gmail com>]

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
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