Gadget Techie

So last night I decided to go ahead and read up on how to enable tethering on my iPhone. For those that do not know, enabling tethering lets you use your iPhone’s 3G data connection to connect your laptop or desktop to the internet. You basically connect the phone to the computer via the iPhone USB cable or bluetooth and voila! Your computer will detect your phone as a network connection and you can surf the internet.

The only reason I had not done this before was because I thought it required some complex process where you had to back up your iPhone’s data, jailbreak the iPhone, reload your data, etc. Turns out it is EXTREMELY easy to enable tethering on the iPhone. Mind you, the iPhone comes with ability to tether right out of the box but AT&T disables it since they do not support it yet.

So now, on to the part you most likely care about: how did I do it? There is a site that you can visit from your iPhone that lets you select your carrier (in my case AT&T) and download and install the new profile required to enable tethering. It is all done through the iPhone Safari web browser and takes less than a minute! It’s fantastic!

The website is help.benm.at/help.php. Once there, scroll down to the Mobileconfigs section and click on download. This will take you to another page where you pick your country and then pick your carrier. Once you do that, it will download the profile and ask you if you want to apply it. Just say yes to everything and once it is done (it’s instant), tethering will have been enabled on your iPhone!

To access the tethering menu, as shown above,  just go to Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering. There you will have the option to turn it on or off. Once it is on you can connect your phone to your computer via the USB cable or bluetooth and your computer should recognize it as a new network. You will then notice that there is a blue banner at the top of your iPhone that says Internet Tethering. This means you are connected to your computer and using your 3G network to connect to the internet.

One word of warning though: while the AT&T data plan is “unlimited”, chances are there is a cap to how much bandwidth (data you can download or upload) you can use in a month. I don’t know for sure that there is one or what it is but it’s probably written somewhere in the fine print. I say this so that you do not think that tethering is a replacement for your dedicated internet service provider. If you overuse the tethering feature, AT&T will most likely notice that your monthly data usage is abnormal and charge you. Therefore, use this sparingly when you are at the airport or at a Borders or Barnes and Nobles and there is no free wifi connection.

Using Speedtest.net, I measured my download and upload speeds of my Macbook Pro and Windows desktop using the tethered iPhone and got around 1.25Mb/s down and 0.28Mb/s up. Pretty decent speeds! Also, because my Macbook Pro has built in bluetooth, I was able to connect to the internet while on the bus and with my iPhone in my pocket! No cable required. It was a lot of fun having internet on the move.

Well that is all. Hope this helps someone. I have kind of slowed down on my Objective-C programming but only because school has started back up and so I have less desire to think than normal but I will start again soon. I am on Chapter 12. Right now I am only writing command line code so it is not interesting enough to put on this blog but once I start messing with Cocoa (the UI), I will definitely post some pictures up of my progress.