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| Written by Jono Cono Rogers iPhone tethering works quite well, I tried it out for the first time last night. I connected my iPhone via USB to my laptop and then on the iPhone went into General Settings and Network and turned tethering on. The driver automatically installed on my laptop which is running Windows Vista Home Premium. Once the driver installed the network was immediately active with local and internet access. You can also tether the iPhone via Bluetooth.
Before trying this out I had thought surfing the web through a tethered iPhone might be slow…not so. I was able to surf the web with ease downloading large files and loading graphic intensive web pages without a problem. I did run a speed test to see what kind of bandwidth I was getting. Download speeds maxed out at 333 KBps and upload speeds at 40 KBps. That’s fairly quick with a 1MB download taking 3 seconds and a 1MB upload taking a fair bit longer at 25 seconds.
Rogers is currently allowing customers with data plans of 1GB or more to enjoy tethering at no extra charge until December 31, 2009. Any data used while tethered will go against the data plan total. Whether Rogers decides to introduce an additional charge for tethering in 2010 will remain to be seen.
It’s nice to have your own private network that can be extended to a desktop or laptop no matter where you go. The only downfall I see from a software side is that the Cellular Network Data Usage statistics on the iPhone don’t reflect the data used while the iPhone is tethered. If you’re only tethering to check some emails or quickly check on some information there’s not much to worry about. If you use tethering extensively as a daily means to access the internet you could easily go beyond the limits of your data plan and end up with a hefty bill. For those on a 6GB data plan like myself it would take a fair amount of web surfing and downloading to chew up the entire data plan. I think it would be good to exercise a certain amount of caution as it would otherwise be tedious to keep track of data used while tethered.
It is possible through checking the Local Area Connection status in Windows to see how many bytes have been sent and received and then calculate that into Megabytes to see how much data has been used at the end of your session. That would have to be noted somewhere each time so you know if you’re getting close to using up all your allowed data transfer for the month.
Overall I think it’s a great feature that works well and is hassle free.
