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I know there are 3G and 4G simulators but it occurs to me there might be a market for a proxy/VPN that really does use 3G or 4G on a connection and feed it back to you for testing in a desktop environment.

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> but it occurs to me there might be a market for a proxy/VPN that really does use 3G or 4G on a connection

Why not just use tethering?

Well I mean on demand, as a service.

http://www.webpagetest.org/ does this for waterfalls, you can select real-world 2G/3G and even LTE

Yes, and I mean what does doing it "as a service" bring over just pushing a button on your phone to act as a hotspot?

Scale? Selection of scenarios? Offload of some management?

What if you have a first-world problem and your cell service is too good and reliable - even forcing the phone to 2G/3G service is not simulation enough.

the you spend some time defining what a typical 2G and 3G connection looks like to your end users, and then you replicate that with existing tools. There are very, very many open source solutions to adding latency, jitter, throttling bandwidth, and replicating packet loss. in fact, I'd argue that coming up with a few solid definitions of what a 2G and 3G connection look like is far more accurate than running tests over one dongle "IRL"

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