Wireless Tethering with the G1 using GWiFi from Ndroi

Over the past summer I was doing a lot of my work at the local coffee shops. I am a huge fan of coffee shops as workspaces especially if you are a consultant. It is a semi-quiet environment, you can listen to your music, there is a constant stream of caffeine  and most importantly, no one bothers you. I used to spend 3-4 hours at one shot sitting in the coffee shop. The biggest drawbacks were the missing social relationships you get when working in an office and a good Internet connection. I am still trying to explore how to compensate for the lack of office interaction via involvement with social networking sites. As far as the Internet connection is concerned, you have a choice between the one supplied by the coffee shop or bringing your own i.e. tethering your laptop to your phone. 

I used to have the Blackberry  Curve and tethering with that was brain-dead easy. Just connect the phone via USB and connect to the Edge network. When I transitioned over to the G1 late last year, tethering was one of the of main features that was missing. As a result, I was paying the $3-$10 for Internet access, depending on the location. Starbucks recently added the new offer of 2 free hours of Internet access if you buy a drink, which is a great deal. But there are situations when you stay for longer than 2 hours, or you are in a coffee shop, airport, hotel or any other place without free Internet access. In those situations the handy GWiFi app for the G1 is a good solution that allows you to tether your laptop to the G1 via WiFi and then use the G1′ s 3G Internet speed. 

GWiFi is developed by Ndroi. The app requires that you have root access to the Android OS on your G1 in order to install. The actual installation instructions on the Ndroi pages are very simple and it took about 10 minutes to complete. Once the app is installed, you simply click on the GWiFi app to start it and select Open to start tethering. From your laptop you’ll see the Peer-to-Peer connection from G1 appear in the list of available wireless networks. Just connect and you are good to go. I was able to browse the Internet and even connect back to another network via VPN. 

One word of caution is that once you open up the tethering, your G1 essentially becomes a hotspot. With no security mechanism or MAC filtering in the app, this means anyone can connect and use your 3G Internet bandwidth. GWiFi does alert you when someone connects so you’ll have a list of connected clients and you can disconnect non-authorized devices. Because of the need for root access and the security concern I mentioned, the app probably is not ready for novice users. Overall it has filled a very large hole in my own list of must haves for the G1.

NOTE: If you have not taken the leap of getting root access to your G1, then you are only scratching the surface of what the phone can do or how you can customize it. I was not too sure about this at first, but after a little reading, the steps were pretty straightforward. 

Here are some screenshots of the app taken from the Ndroi site. 

 A picture of GWiFi icon in the app list.

After starting the app, the GWiFi icon appears in the Status bar.

Click Open to start tethering. All connected client machines will appear in the list.

Update: If you want to tether without gaining root access to the G1 you can try this, but the limitiations are it only works for Web traffic using Firefox as the browser.

Photo credit: crouchingrasshoppa

Tags: android, blackberry curve, g1, tethering