iPhone tethering personal hotspot shows up a as a new network each time (plus the smart quote is silly)

I often use my iPhone as a Personal Hotspot. I'm not sure what's changed in iOS5 but one problem still exists and the other has gotten worse. First, the 802.11 wireless specification doesn't say anything about the character encoding of the SSID (Service Set Identifier - the think that names your access point). Most APs and Operating Systems assume that the string will be straight ASCII and code page 1252. However, Apple iOS devices default to yourname's iPhone where the quote ' is a smart quote like this ’, so Scott’s iPhone. Just as I mentioned in my post on "Why the #AskObama Tweet was Garbled on Screen: Know your UTF-8, Unicode, ASCII and ANSI Decoding Mr. President" even smart folks can mess this up. Since the iPhone is assuming that the encoding is UTF-8 while the rest of folks are assuming ASCII, we end up with "Scott’s iPhone."

It's harmless, but it's irritating. I've filed a feature request with Windows (it's not a bug per se, but rather what appears to be an ambiguous spec that makes everyone look bad, IMHO).

If if bugs you too, you can Right Click on the network icon near your click and "open Network and Sharing Center" then click on the ICON that represents your network. That will get you this dialog (that you've likely never seen before because clicking on the icon isn't intuitive).

In that dialog you can change the name and the icon of the connection. Fancy.

If you really really want to fix it, then change the name of your phone to include a ' rather than a ’ by going to Settings | About | Name.

However, since the iOS 5.1 update last month every time I tether my iPhone I get a new Wireless Network. I'm currently on Scott's iPhone 12 and it keeps going up. I'm not sure what changed in this update but it's clearly changed because everyone is seeing this behavior.

I like my things tidy, so I wanted to merge or delete all these superfluous networks. Remember that dialog above that we got to my clicking on the icon in Network and Sharing Center? Well, at the bottom it has another button that you've never seen before. I know I hadn't.

Click on Merge and you will be shocked to see the last six billion networks that you've connected to. You're very wirelessly promiscuous, aren't you?

From here you can select and merge together all your duplicate networks, as well as delete ones you don't want to have Windows remember.

Hope this helps! I hope that this is fixed in both iOS, the specification AND in Windows. Specification ambiguity hurts everyone.