UK: What is going on with Internet Tethering on iPhone/O2?
By Ben Robinson on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 11:26 PM PST In O2, iPhone OS
Wow.
I wrote a piece a little while ago about the Internet Tethering not working too well on the iPhone/MacBook Pro combo (I think it could just as well be any Mac), but I wasn’t expecting it to be this bad….!
As I noted previously, I’ve been doing some testing of the Tethering to see how it performs – the simple summary was “not good”. However, given that most of these tests had been in areas of only average data coverage, I figured I ought to give things another shot – big mistake!
What I’ve now found is that even in areas of good 3G coverage, the data rates are not very excellent, and even worse, I am beginning to think the Tethering implementation is buggy. Why do I say this? Well, tethering has managed to crash both iTunes on the Mac, and completely lock the 3GS, to the point where it needed the power/home key combo to turn the thing off.
This is really quite disappointing indeed – the 3GS should have everything it needs to make it a great data modem, but I wonder if there is just too much else already going inside it’s shell for it to dedicate sufficient resources to the job. Bear in mind it’s got to hold up a cellular connection really well, and also pipeline the data over USB to the MacBook – something which dedicated USB data modems seem to do with great aplomb.
If I had any doubts, they are now confirmed – I’ll be cancelling the Tethering add-on I have, and buying a separate data modem from probably Vodafone or 3 – let’s see how they perform!
If you do still want to try out Internet Tethering, you can visit the O2 (NYSE: TEF) website here.
Works perfectly on a PC for me. I regularly achieve speeds of upto 7.3 Mbps. This is the physical capacity of the 3GS. The connection rarely breaks.
Use this at RG1 3NY.
Hi I got a 3g iPhone in my area ba2 5dg the 3g can get up to 200kB/s with speed on averege 100kb/s (DL) when I tether the Internet to my intel mac book in the ‘ activety monitor’ under conection speed I can see that the speed of the conection is caped at 50kb/s and in the safari download window the download speed is arround 29kb/s where is the other 21kb/s going and why the connection speed is caped at 50 between the device and mac??? Plus I get the freezing as well, at least twice a day running the 3.1 after a clean restore…