The simplest way to get fast 3G Internet

So I just recently moved into my new apartment and was told that I wouldn’t be able to get any internet access for at least a week. Well, this is completely unacceptable for me seeing as my entire financial life revolves around the internet. No Internet = No Money.

Luckily, I heard somewhere that you can harness the power of your 3G iPhone to use its internet on your laptop. So for the last few hours I’ve been researching how to do this. At first I stumbled upon lifehackers tutorial on using SSH to use your iPhone’s EDGE data on your laptop and although I did everything right (at least I think) I could not get the proxy system to work.

Luckily I came across a comment in reply to some blog post where they mentioned a jailbroken iphone app called “PdaNet”. I figured it was too good to be true. It was simply as advertised a “wifi router” for the iPhone. Surprisingly it turned out to work great and allowed me to write this post.

So this is what you have to do.

Jailbreak your iPhone

It takes no more than 5 minutes and allows you access to a slew of other unofficial applications. You can find a good tutorial here.

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/09/29/how-to-jailbreak-iphone-21-windows-edition/

Install PdaNet

After you have jailbroken your iPhone you will see two new applications called “cydia” and “installer”. Go ahead and open up cydia. Click the search button located in the right hand corner and search for, yep that’s right you guessed it “PdaNet”. Download it and install it.

Create an ad hoc network on your pc

An “Ad Hoc” network is just a temporary network established between two computers so that they can connect to eachother, share files etc. If you are using a mac just click the airport button and go from there, it’s pretty self explanatory. Make sure you have “ad hoc” selected when you are creating it. For window users, do the following: Click the wifi tab in your taskbar, when you are presented with your “connect to a network” window, look down and there should be a link saying “create a new connection or network”, click that. Fourth one down should say “Create an ad hoc or computer to computer network”, select that. Set an encryption if you want, although it’s better without one. 

After your pc is connected to it, go back to your iphone or itouch into the settings tab and then into the wifi tab, connect to the newly created network.  Then go back to the application you just installed called PdaNet and boot it up. Wait a few moments and that’s it! You can even close the application and your iPhone will continue to broadcast.

This is the simplest method I found, if you know of anything easier then make sure to let us know.

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