No Internet, No Fun – Android USB Tethering
Doh! Since Sunday morning my DSL modem is gone. Seems to be related to the thunderstorms we had in our area recently. Bad luck. Time for me to check out tethering applications for my Android phone…
A quick search on my G1 brought up to promising results for use with non-rooted Android devices: PdaNet and azilink. Next thing I had to do was downloading the tools onto the SD card of my phone and to copy it to the desktop PC afterwards. Should be quite easy, shouldn’t it?
PdaNet was the first to try: Installation is pretty straight forward. No separate packages and downloads needed. Just double click the executable, follow the instructions and you’re done. You’ll get a background application, a special USB driver for the Android phone and a modem driver – plus a new app on your Android phone. What I instantly liked about it – besides the installation process – is the tray icon. I know that a lot of people hate applications which put themselves into the tray but in this case it’s really the easiest in terms of usability. A click on the icon opens a context menu where you simply select “Connect” and you’re done! It’s such easy… At least in theory because it seems there is an issue with PdaNet and my Vista system. It crashed immediately 
I played around and had a quick search in the Internet (via my mobile again) but haven’t found an immediate solution for the problem. So I turned to the next tethering software candidate…
azilink download was my first trouble. As I had no working Internet connection on my PC I had to download azilink on my G1. However, the ZIP archive didn’t want to download as it is an “unsupported file format” on the Android phone. Side note: At this time I wondered why the EXEcutable of PdaNet downloaded without any complains?! So next thing I had to do was to browse the Android market for something which might help. I came up with Download Crunch: “Allows Browser/Download Manager to download files that may not have associated applications”. This time the download of azilink worked. Hooray! I have copied the archive from SD card to my desktop, opened the HOWTO just to find out that I have to download another package, OpenVPN, to make everything work… Okay, okay, I could have seen this on the azilink web site but honestly it’s really a pain in the neck to search and download everything via the Android phone. So I must admit that I just overlooked this little information when downloading the app. After I had everything copied, the setup on my desktop PC was quite easy. Just follow the HOWTO instructions with one little caveat: OpenVPN isn’t really UAC (Vista User Account Control) aware and so you have to take care to start it as administrator. Otherwise it won’t establish a connection to your mobile.
But finally, after about one hour of experimenting… taadaaa… I had a working Internet connection on my Windows PC. Hooray! I must admit that I’m quite surprised that everything works so well. The connection is slow as I have no 3G available at my home but at least I had no connection losses, no hang-ups or anything similar. The speed just reminds me of my famous Elsa Microlink 14.4 modem 
There are other Tethering apps out there like Tetherbot but I must admit that I haven’t tried one of them. Having a working connection was my main priority 
I wonder if anybody of you had similar troubles or if you know any better and easier solution to use the Android phone for tethering? I’m looking forward to hear from you!
Hi! My name is 
Als Root funktioniert aNetshare sehr gut, das war auch einer der Gründe, warum ich Root wurde. PdaNet lief bei mir zwar, allerdings war die Internetverbindung sehr langsam und stellenweise haben sich die Seiten gar nicht aufgebaut. Allerdings ist das jetzt auch schon ne Weile her, und es gab seitdem verschiedene Updates. Vielleicht solltest du es auch einfach noch mal probieren?
Gruß
Michael
PdaNet war tatsächlich die neueste Version… daran sollte es eher nicht gelegen haben. Ich muss aber auch zugeben, dass ich es nicht übermäßig getestet habe. Azilink hat seinen Dienst ja schließlich getan. Root-en wollte ich mein G1 zu diesem Zeitpunkt nicht auch noch – wobei dieses aNetshare wirklich vielversprechend aussieht. Hat das Rooten eigentlich irgendwelche Einschränkungen? Kann man mit einem gerooteten Telefon beispielsweise noch Applikationen im Marktplatz kaufen?
Gruß,
André
Interesting title, No internet-No fun—Nice…