Facetime over tethered 3G

March 17, 2011 - daring-fireball facetime reachability

John Gruber just confirmed that it’s possible to use Facetime on the iPad 2 while tethered (via Wifi) to an iPhone’s 3G connection. It’s worth noting that Apple’s own Developer Tech Services explicitly recommend to third-party app developers NOT to use the type of network to determine whether it will have sufficient bandwidth to support an application (for exactly this reason - MiFi devices will deliver 3G speed over WiFi). Assuming the Facetime developers aren’t ignoring Apple’s own advice, I would speculate that the WiFi restriction is more a favour to the carriers rather than a technical limitation.