Android Tethering

Lee Findlow — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:04:16 +0000

I’ve been considering getting one of those 3G USB dongles for a while now, even on Pay-as-you-go tariffs the prices are now cheap enough that it isn’t really an issue of cost, more the lack of signal in places where I would want to use it. I have a unlimited data on my phone so figured why not use that? After a bit of googling it seemed the only way on an Android phone was to “root” it, my initial idea was to maybe SSH tunnel data through the device, the bonus being that it would work over WiFi too, but didn’t get very far with that as it seemed too much hassle to potential brick my phone. Then eventually I found a pretty cool looking app called proxoid. No rooting required, just a little terminal knowledge.

On OS X just install the app from the link above, enable USB Debugging on your phone,download the Android SDK , and in the “tools” folder run:
./adb forward tcp:8080 tcp:8080

And you should be setup, now just launch Firefox (or other browser) and set the HTTP proxy to localhost port 8080.

One change that I did have to make was to set the User-Agent filter to remove within proxoid, I’m presuming Vodafone was picking this up and blocking connections.

For full instructions check out proxoid’s site here: http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/wiki/installation

So far I’ve only been able to use this over a GPRS connection, so sub dial-up speeds, but even that was surprisingly quick and I look forward to trying it out over 3G.

As for terms and conditions? Well, I suspected there would be an issue but after a bit of research it seems that they are ok with it so long as you don’t use it excessively (see here and here).

Obviously I’ve found this out just as Android 2.2 has been released (with tethering support built in). But from what I can see its very unlikely that my “old” HTC Magic will get that update any time soon, if at all!

Nothing To Say Here » Android

Android Tethering