EDGE Tethering on AT&T with iPhone 3G OS 3.0

Well, I found a super easy way to enable tethering on my newly updated iPhone 3G with OS 3.0. Details can be had here.

The setup on the iPhone took about 30 seconds, and setting up the Network was even easer. Once I had enabled tethering in the iPhones Network Settings, I simply connected back to my desktop via the iPhone cable, and my Mac told me I had a new network device.

I tried to setup Bluetooth, and I got so far as to “pair” the iPhone with my desktop, but alas, Bluetooth failed on me again. Honestly, this was almost expected because I have been unable to use Bluetooth with any consistency with any Mac I have.

Of-course being here in beautifully-yet-ludditstic Crossville we only have EDGE, but that did not deter me from taking the tether out for a speed test.

My test site of choice is Speak Easy, and let me say up front that the test took a llloooonngg time to run, and had to be retried several times to get a result. Durning this time period I was kept entertained by the buzzes and pops coming from the speakers. Nothing makes you contemplate homicide like the sounds of cell phone interference from unshielded amplified speakers.

In the end, the results were not too shabby.

89/29 isn’t bad, and still fractionally beats my old dial up speeds from back in the day at CrISP. But this isn’t the Internet of 1997, so surfing on these speeds was almost impossible. However, I could get access to the terminal, and SSH worked with some snap. So in a pinch, this I think would work to do some remote administering via the command line, but Screen Sharing is out of the question.

Looking back on my Notes, I found I had published a Similar Test back in December. Oddly, on that test I got much faster download speeds than I did today.

I’ll be in a 3G network soon and I ‘ll conduct the test again to get a feel for how much faster 3G is over EDGE in Tennessee.