On my last post I talked about the new MMS features with regards to sending pictures in the iPhone 3.0 software update. In this article, I will document my experience trying out the tethering capabilities built right into the iPhone. Now like MMS, tethering technologies have been available on other platforms for years, and without jail-breaking your iPhone, you couldn’t do it previously.
The iPhone is only available on 2 carriers in Canada: Fido and Rogers. I am with Rogers and at launch of the 3.0 update they were one of the carriers that were ready to support tethering. I had to dig a bit to find out what were the conditions of tethering, can I do it now? Will I be charged a ton of money to do it? Do I need some kind of tethering enabled plan?
I managed to find this blurb on the Rogers web site:
So lucky me I already have a 1 GB data plan so I wasn’t worried about incurring charges. And it seems that I have until the end of the year to enjoy this. I haven’t seen anything yet as to what happens in 2010, but I’ll keep digging. A good resource for this is the forums at iphoneincanada.ca where they have a thread on iPhone plans that people can post.
Tethering
This is incredibly easy to do. My first test was with connecting the iPhone to my Windows Vista PC using the dock connector cable that comes with the phone. I made sure wireless was off and the ethernet cable was unplugged and that I had no internet access.
First up is you go to Settings, General and then Network to see this screen:
Click into Internet Tethering to get this screen:
You toggle the ON/OFF and almost immediately are are setup, when you go back to the home screen a nice little blue bar indicates that tethering is enabled:
It’s very similar to when you exit a call to go to the home screen, only not green but blue. When you think about it, it makes sense and is handy to know so that you don’t leave it on and suck up all the bandwidth on your account.
When charging and the phone is locked, you still get the blue indicator:
When I went back to my Vista PC, a new prompt came up:
I choose Home just to get rid of this screen and that was it. I fired up my browser and hit my first web page on tethering:
On the final part I will show the Bluetooth connection with my new iMac and visit a speed testing web site.
Note: this article originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on August 3rd.