Timmy's 20 Second Tech Tips Tim Dunham
Date Title Description
Sunday December 27, 2009 Share your cell phone internet connection with a computer This tip will show you how to share your internet connection that your cell phone has with a laptop or even desktop computer without the need to purchase an additional service.
Without realizing it, we walk through data floating in the air all day long... whether it is television, radio, cellular, blue tooth or one of many others.  The key is how to access it which many already have the tools, they are just lacking the understanding on how to use the tool for this job.  With a television, you'd use an antenna or satellite dish, with a computer you'd use a router and with a cell phone you use cell towers.  Many devices have the ability to share connections; cell phones and computers do as well.  Because there are SO many variations of phones, data plans, cellular providers and versions of operating systems, I am unable to show you specifically how to do this on each one.  What I can do is point you in the right direction; try Google to search some of these:

(replace "iPhone" with whatever type of data phone you have)

Use my iPhone as a modem

Tether my iPhone with my computer

Share my iPhone internet connection

What I have found the best way to make this work is to create an "ad hoc" or "computer-to-computer" network connection on my laptop:
1. Right Click the Network icon, select "Properties"
2. Select "Set up a new connection of network"
3. Select "Set up a wireless ad hoc (computer-to-computer) network"
4. Create a network name, in this case I called mine "iPhone", then select the appropriate security type and you are done.
Then I would install a free copy of PDANet to my iPhone from www.JuneFabrics.com (plenty of instruction on this site for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, PalmOS Treo and Centro; there was NOTHING needed to install on my laptop... all I needed to do was click on my little wireless network button on my task bar and select my iPhone as the network and I was online.  I have not found a tremendous need to use this very much, but from time to time it is helpful to browse a website on the big laptop screen instead of the little iPhone screen when I am not near a wireless network.

As always make sure that what you are doing here is allowable by your cellular provider, I read somewhere that if you use too much bandwidth on an unlimited data plan that you could be interpreted by your cellular provider as excessive or misuse.  Research this before you decide to do this.