Using an iPhone 2.2 as a 3G modem

I'm doing a demo at a site that has a totally locked down Windows network so I need a wireless internet connection... Until now, my iPhone has not been jailbroken, but I finally cracked, and it works very well.

Here's the steps:

• Grab a copy of QuickPWN


• Run it and follow the on-screen instructions


• (When iTunes pops up, or says things, just ignore it but leave it running)


• Run Cydia and let it update itself


• Under commercial applications is PdaNet, install it (you get a demo period)


• On your laptop, create a WiFi network


• On the iPhone, go to settings, Wi-Fi and join the network you created


• Run PDANet, let it sit for a few seconds to figure things out


• On the laptop, use the internet, it works!


• Leaving PDANet running, press the power button on the iPhone to save power, it keeps running


• When you've finished using it, go to PDANet and turn off Wi-Fi router and exit

This is all much smoother than I read it used to be, starting proxies from a command line etc.

While it's running you get a status display.

On the tethered computer it feels pretty snappy. I used OsSpeedTest, and measured the download of a 3MB image at 169 KB/s which is what they suggest I should get on an ADSL 1 connection.

As I said, it feels snappy, which is often a result of good DNS and low latency as much as raw speed.

Naturally, this whole exercise was an experiment and I wouldn't dream of breaching any terms of use.

PDANet for iPhone has a 14 day trial of "full mode" which proxies all traffic, after that the free version just does HTTP. The full version costs $29.

Update

My iPhone has been acting a little strangely. Three times it has kind of crashed as an email notification comes in. In one case it dropped a call and I couldn't call back until I'd rebooted it which took more than just turning it off.

So I can't say if it's the jailbreaking or if version 2.2 is less stable than 2.1. I've done a restore back to 2.2 native from Apple and we'll see how that goes.