Tethering an iPhone for use as an internet dongle

April 22, 2010

You can use your iPhone as a broadband dongle for your laptop. When you are on the move and need to connect your laptop to the internet to sync your email and other services, rather than trying to do everything via the iPhone interface you can use the iPhone as an internet dongle (via a tether – either via a direct USB connection or via bluetooth).

You can’t set up this 3G internet connection automatically, you will need to sign upto a tethering contract with your mobile provider. The costs break down as follows:

o2 tethering

£10 per month to download upto 3GB of data per month. If you go over your download limit you will be charged at 20p per MB.

Orange tethering

£5 per month to download upto 500MB of data per month.

£10 per month to download upto 1.5GB of data per month. Going over your limits on Orange are less than o2 at 2p per MB.

Further sharing of your mobile internet connection

Once have got your laptop tethering to your iPhone you can further share your internet connection to other computers. Once you start sharing the internet speed is going to drop quickly but if a few of you are stuck without a wifi connection but ‘have to’ get on the internet then sharing your mobile connection is a handy feature. Use the ‘Sharing’ function in the System preference on your laptop and select ‘share your connection’ from the drop down menu. Remember to make the connection private and secure!

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