Is APN name case sensitive?

Question

Is every APN name case sensitive? Also, how important is APN name? When I use airtel SIM, every APN name seems to work, (sim is 64K type). But if apn name is airtelgprs.com and I use SIM idea it does not work.

Answer 1

APN names are not case sensitive by definition:

From ETSI TS 123 003 V5.11.0 (2006-06) and ETSI TS 123 003 V11.7.0 (2013-12) - an old and recent version to show that it has not changed as the spec evolved (the bolding is mine):

The encoding of the APN shall follow the Name Syntax defined in RFC 2181 [18], RFC 1035 [19] and RFC 1123 [20]. The APN consists of one or more labels. Each label is coded as a one octet length field followed by that number of octets coded as 8 bit ASCII characters. Following RFC 1035 [19] the labels shall consist only of the alphabetic characters (A-Z and a-z), digits (0-9) and the hyphen (-). Following RFC 1123 [20], the label shall begin and end with either an alphabetic character or a digit. The case of alphabetic characters is not significant. The APN is not terminated by a length byte of zero.

The APN name is generally very important as the operator uses it to steer the connection to a particular network (internet, private network, operators own network service such as MMS etc) and/or to associate a set of security and usage policies with a particular access set.