UPDATE (26-10-2008): a newer post related to this

I am for a short period in USA. So I was looking at some prepaid GSM SIM cards and the most attractive for me was T-Mobile’s prepaid service. From those, I’ve chosen for some reasons Prepaid SideKick plan, which (not surprisingly, as it is states in the presentation of the plan) is working ONLY on SideKick device for the data traffic, voice is fine.

I was basically looking for a way to use this plan on my iPhone. For the SideKick plans, the APN to be used is for sure hiptop.t-mobile.com - only this APN seems to communicate/process something with the network, any other APN will NOT work and will give you on iPhone “Could not activate EDGE".

However, this APN implementation has some kind of software check that is allowing only SideKick devices to route data thru it.

I was able to get IP address and DNS IP address for the EDGE interface of iPhone, but no pinging/routing was availabe, not even to the proxies mentioned in other blogs nor pinging/routing of DNS IP addresses it have gotten from the network.

Since the EDGE interface is not having a MAC associated (someone, correct me if I am wrong. I have checked it also with ifconfig from iPhone terminal). Having no MAC, what are the other information the APN software/hardware could use to identify and permit only SideKick devices. Could it be IMEI? If it is IMEI, then IMEI change utility for iPhone would do the job - but we need IMEI patterns for SideKick devices. If it is anything else, what is it?

Here are some logs which I got from iPhone’s BB dump (baseband, GSM processor, whatever you call it):

_________

173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “216.220.208.209″, “216.220.212.29″
173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173789393 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
173789405 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.116.158.163″
_________

174312526 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgdcont=1,"IP","”
174312535 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174312535 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xgauth=1,1,"","”
174312542 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174312542 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns=1,1
174312549 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174312556 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgact=1,1
174313489 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174313490 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns?
174313500 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “216.220.208.209″, “216.220.212.29″
174313502 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174313502 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
174313514 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.119.157.172″
174313515 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
174313516 send[pdp_0]: at+cgdata="M-RAW_IP",1
_________

173789374 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns?
173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “216.220.208.209″, “216.220.212.29″
173789393 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173789393 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
173789405 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.116.158.163″
173789408 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173789409 send[pdp_0]: at+cgdata="M-RAW_IP",1
_________

173830458 send[pdp_ctl]: at+xdns?
173830469 recv[pdp_ctl]: +XDNS: 1, “0.0.0.0″, “0.0.0.0″
173830471 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173830472 send[pdp_ctl]: at+cgpaddr=1
173830482 recv[pdp_ctl]: +CGPADDR: 1,"10.203.202.171″
173830484 recv[pdp_ctl]: OK
173830484 send[pdp_0]: at+cgdata="M-RAW_IP",1
_________

DISCLAIMER: this post is intended purely for research and educative purposes. Any use of this information is sole responsibility of the reader/user and the author is not to be held liable for any miss-use of the above informative technical details.

TAGS: iPhone, IMEI, change iPhone IMEI, iPhone EDGE T-Mobile, TMobile, T-Mobile, EDGE, iPhone Sidekick, iPhone T-Mobile, Sidekick prepaid, Sidekick data iPhone