My mother always said “You can never have enough good tether apps”. And as usual, she is right. Each new tether app that comes out seems to add a valuable piece to the connectivity puzzle, enabling us to be more mobile than ever before.
For those unfamilar with tethering, it basically means connecting your laptop to your phone to get access to the Internet. Pretty straightforward. It comes in very useful if you are travelling and need to get your laptop online. Alternatively you could pay the $5-$20/day that is usually charged by hotels. If you are only connecting to check e-mail, then these prices are very unreasonable. With the increase in mobile speeds, now capable of supporting 3G, you won’t even notice a difference in Internet performance for light use. You may even be able to stream BSG or 30 Rock from Hulu.com without any hiccups.
In order to successfully setup tethering, you will need three items.
- Laptop (PC or Mac)
- Mobile phone that supports tethering (T-Mobile G1, BlackBerry, etc…)
- Tethering app that runs either on the phone (as in the G1’s case) or laptop (for Blackberry users)
Proxy vs IP Routing
There are two primary types of configurations for the tethering app that allows you to connect to the Internet through your phone: proxy or IP routing. Both of these methods are effective and have different capabilities. Here is a very brief description of the two. I tried not to be too technical.
Proxies are application aware i.e. can understand the difference between an HTTP stream vs. FTP stream. Often proxies are also more secure than vanilla routing apps. While this level of intelligence if great for looking at the content of the traffic and doing other interesting things, it can be slow and limited by the protocols supported.
IP routing simply take packets from one place and shoves it down another direction. It doesn’t care about the application as long it has an IP address wrapped around it. Most routing apps utilize Network Address Translation (NAT) to provide an additional layer of security.
If you would like more technical information on the differences between the two, you can visit Wikipedia and search proxy or routing.
Some of the drawbacks of proxy apps in the tethering scenario are limitations in the type of traffic you can send through your phone. For example, simple Web browsing would probably not be a problem. More complex scenarios like trying to VPN through your phone may not work with apps using the proxy method. Since one of the main things I use tethering for is to VPN back to a business partner’s network, I prefer the routing method. Being more universally applicable will make the routing method more dominate I believe.
USB or WiFi Connectivity
Tethering has come a long way in ease of installation and usability from when I first set it up on my BlackBerry 8700 years ago. Back then I had to go through some gyrations with the BlackBerry Desktop software and connected to my phone via a USB cable. BlackBerry tethering has become a lot easier to setup, but you still need software on your computer.
Now, with my T-Mobile G1, I simply download one of the free tetherings apps from the Android Marketplace and connect to my phone via WiFi. Within seconds I am surfing the Web. No software needed on my computer. This makes it much easier especially when my USB cable is nowhere to be found. Considering the G1 is now less that $100 from Amazon.com
WiFi is the easiest method but not necessarily the most secure. The problem is that once you enable WiFi tethering on your G1, it instantly becomes an Internet hotspot. In some cases this may be more of a feature than liability. For example, if you are in a hotel room and a couple friends need Internet access, they can just connect to your phone. The downside is that it allows anyone to hijack your 3G connection and bandwidth. None of the apps I have seen on the market support any type of wireless encryption but based on the results of my rudimentary survey, I don’t think that is a problem. Some of the apps, GWiFi and ANetShare, notify you when someone connects via WiFi on the phone and let’s you block based on IP address. This probably is OK for now, but a more robust tethering app with built-in wireless security is still lacking. This is a great opportunity for a security software company to bring a safe tethering experience to the Android market.
With all of the benefits of tethering that I have written about, you should know that most service providers are not too keen on customers using their phone for tethered Internet access. Providers like T-Mobile, AT&T and others sell 3G cards and would prefer customers purchase those. While I can understand these providers want more money from selling additional services, they need to look elsewhere.
If you are eager to play with one of the tether options for the G1, just be warned that the majority of tether apps require that you have Root access on the phone. Gaining Root access is actually stratightforward and takes about 15-20 min.
If you anyone knows of a tether app that does not require root access or offers better security options, I would be interested in hearing about it.
Tags: tethering
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