iPhone Tethering
This is my iPhone tethering story. With the cable down and no where else to turn I looked to my trusty swiss-army knife of utilities: My iPhone... did it pass or fail? Well, before I tell my Saturday evening Internet story, I'll preface with the fact that I'm upset that Rogers isn't including Internet tethering unto us lowly 500MB/month folks. Seriously, what's up with that? They can't be worried about me going over my data limit, as that would just make them more money!
The Story
The cable seemed to be out in the apartment this evening, so I decided what better time than now to get tethering work on my phone. This was not a huge feat of wizardry, it is quite well documented throughout the web. After that went smoothly, I just plugged it in. I'm writing this post on my new fan-dangled tethering device, and the connection is wonderfully persistent (so far). I'll be Frank, Frank is surprised how easily and wonderfully easy (did he mention that it was easy?) it was to get running. One thing Frank noticed is that iTunes appears to be taking ~%12-18 CPU to keep the connection going, which he figured was just because iTunes was pulling double duty as an emergency Internet connection, and frankly, Frank was okay with that. Frank also enjoyed the browsing speed. He immediately noticed that pages were a lot snappier on his laptop as opposed to his phone, which he used to partially attribute to the 3G network, but he is now seeing that it's mostly due to the slower rendering speed of a page on his iPhone! Since such a discovery, Frank decided to run a speed test while hooked to his new tethered interwebs.
The results
A decent 308ms ping time and a whopping 3.89mbit down speed. That's quite honestly faster than Frank can reliably count on his Eastlink cable speed.
So this evening, Frank and I discovered that in case of emergency, the Internet is always there for me; braving hell and high water, through broken cable and wireless data networks. It was just as simple as switching a setting and plugging the iPhone in. Does anyone else have feedback on iPhone tethering? I'd like to know if your experience was as freakishly smashing as mine!