If you're on AT&T's (NYSE: T) network and am looking forward to tethering your iPhone someday soon, it might be best to temper your enthusiasm a bit. For the uninitiated, tethering involves connecting smartphones or mobile phones to laptops so that these devices could have access to the Internet.

When Engadget reached out to AT&T recently, the telecommunication company basically admitted to not being able to handle the data traffic on its network. Arguing that it is working to improve its coverage, AT&T wrote, "iPhone tethering has the potential to exponentially increase traffic, and we need to ensure that we're able to deliver excellent performance for the feature--over and above the increases in data traffic we're already seeing--before we will offer the feature."

AT&T might not have much time to get its act together, though. While tethering was once the sole domain of power users or road warriors, it has quickly evolved into the minimum expectation of users seeking the ability to quickly and easily connect with cloud services and the Internet while on the go.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek 

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