Revenue Driving Tether Decisions

There are a lot possibilities for tethering through the G1 that essentially takes future revenue away from carriers.

• I can image a world where every consumer electronics device supports both WiFi and 3G (or whatever speed comes out next). These can be location aware devices, gaming devices or in-car devices. For each of these devices, carriers may make somewhere between $1 – $15/month. 
• Think of all the netbooks that will ship over the next couple years. Now think of all the 3G cards that will ship with them and the $30/mo. 3G service for each card. Now you can understand the carrier’s reluctancy to support WiFi tethering through the G1.

If you have root access to your phone, you don’t have to worry, the free tether apps I am sure will pop up in various places so you will still have the joy of tethering to your hearts content.

iPod Tethering News

Tethering with the G1 over WiFi now gives your Apple iPod touch Internet access from anywhere. That has always been the case with WiFi tethering so it’s not really new news. But with the recent availability of Skype for the Apple iPod touch, it makes even more sense. Now you can call other Skype users for free over the T-Mobile G1’s 3G network. Long distance calling is also very inexpensive over Skype. 

Just a reminder that you can have all this greatness only after you root your Android phone.

Finally, I previously stated that I was going to take a break from tethering news and updates. That break didn’t last long thanks to the above announcements.

Over the course of 3 months, I’ve been impressed with the evolution of tether apps and the quality of their user experience. The downside of having so many tether apps on the Marketplace is trying to figure out which one works best. Everyone has their own needs and uses for tethering. Fortunately there is enough variety of apps to meet most customer requirements. 

Let’s start with a comparison chart showing what tether apps are available on the Marketplace. Some of the information in the below chart is from the wonderful site Cyrket.com which allows you to browse through the Marketplace using your computer rather than solely going through your Android phone. Other parts of the table have come from the vendor’s site or my own experience with the app. 

Looking at the table, I broke the features down by what might be most appealing to certain consumers. For example, just going down the list of rows you can pretty much filter the apps based on the key differences: price, need for root access and connection type. Extra things like WiFi security and, current rating in the Marketplace and changing the SSID may also be relevant in your decision making process. The last row has a QR code that you can scan using the Android barcode scanner to go directly to the Android Marketplace and install the app.

You’ll notice in the above table that I also included the USB tether app PDANet. The one downside of WiFi tether apps is the requirement of having root access to your phone. As easy as it may be to gain root access, it is a reality that not everyone wants to root their phone. For those individuals, the PDANet might be the best option. It was recently announced and is in beta for Windows only.

Because of the nature of a USB tether app, only one client can connect to your phone at any time. In addition, that client must have the tether app software installed on it. These are a couple of the biggest limitations of USB tether apps. But as I said, those without root access to their Android phones will just have to be happy with tethering through USB. 

Of the above WiFi tether apps, I have successfully installed and used aNetShare and Wifi Tether for Root Users. The others require purchasing them which I really have no interest in doing since there are two very nice free ones. I should note the Marketplace does offer a 24 refund on apps so trying the paid tether apps are almost risk free. Based on the feedback in the Marketplace for tether Wifi and Toggle Tether, both work and are worth the price of purchase. Also, I am assuming that all of these apps will work on any Android phone and not just the  T-Mobile G1 from HTC.

I have listed all of the apps I was able to find that matched the ‘tether’ term in the Marketplace and the table is accurate based on the resources I mentioned earlier. If there are any mistakes in the above table or if there are other tether apps that should be included, then feel free to keep me updated and I can updated the table.

After  so many tether-related posts, I am planning to take a break from writing about tethering unless something really interesting comes on the market, like WPA for WiFi tethering.

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.

1. Laptop (PC or Mac)
2. Mobile phone that supports tethering (T-Mobile G1, BlackBerry, etc…)
3. 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 and Costco, the cost for the phone pays itself after a couple months of not having to buy WiFi access from hotels. Do you really need a Boingo account anymore when you can tether?

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.

It’s not the end of the world if the app doesn’t provide any type of wireless encryption or MAC filtering. For example, in lieu of those esential security features, you can protect the WiFi network by monitoring who connects by looking at the status screen of the GWiFi app. If you see another computer connect, you can immediately disconnect them. Not the best security mechanism as you can see. 

To find out if other G1 users feel wireless security is important, I put together a quick question and sent it out via Twitter.  I explicilty named WPA and MAC filtering as two security options since those were the most well known. My guess is that most people will be happy with just being able to tether and securing that connection is of lesser importance. I’ll report back with the results in a future blog entry.

Photo Credit: CarbonNYC

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