The recently introduced iOS 7.1 appears to be causing trouble with personal hotspots for a number of iPhone users all over the world. Some users were unable to save APN settings for personal hotspots following the update.

Although users can enter information into the APN fields of the Cellular Date Settings menu, the values cannot be saved not to mention that attempting to establish a tethered connection results in an error message.

Many users from all over the globe were reporting similar problems with tethering, which resulted to the 15 pages thread on the issue that started following the release of the iOS 7.1.

Customer service representatives suggest that the issue lies with carriers and Apple support staff seems to be confused by the cause of the problem. On the other hand, according to the carriers that have been contacted the issue was with Apple and not with them.

A typical complaint posted in the forum says, "Same here. Hotspot not working since I upgraded to 7.1. Such an annoying issue. I phoned my carrier this morning and they didn't want to get involved since "it's a device issue since settings can't be saved". No carrier updates either when I installed 7.1. So right now, no hotspot and no one wants to get involved."

As of the moment the thread has had 16,000 views with more than 200 replies but there is still no clue to the cause of the problem.

Meanwhile, other users say that the problem is limited to carriers that are not in contract with Apple at the moment. It is determined, that the Cupertino tech giant is trying to plug the security loopholes with a ban of unauthorised use of Hotspot via carriers that are not under a contract. Unauthorised carriers allegedly have been exploiting tethering for their own means by preying on its innocent customers. The iPhone 5s, 5, 4s and 4 from Spain, Germany, Austria, Serbia, India, Estonia, Italy, Belgium, Thailand, Brazil and Hungary are all affected by the problem and thus far, there is no available fix.

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