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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

This is huge. I don't use an iOS product, but I can say that having this ability on my rooted Android over the last year has gotten me (and various other parties) out of several pinches.

Recently while traveling, we ended up at a hotel with almost useless wi-fi, no jailbroken iPhones and thus almost no connectivity. Break out the Android, turn on the hotspot, hand out passwords, and now my entire team is back up and running at decentish speeds. Probably helped us land a contract in the meeting the next day.

It wasn't perfect, the phone would drop connection every so often (hey, it's not really supposed to be doing this), and would run rather hot. But it worked and got us out of a bind.

I'm letting the rest of my team know about this so that they might jailbreak their phones and be able to use this when they are running around without an Android user. Awesome!

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Just to be clear, tethering your data connection has been available on the iPhone since version 3 without jailbreaking. Wireless hotspots have been available since iOS 4.3 without jailbreaking.

Only for $20/month. There are things you can install on your Android (even non-rooted AFAIK), or on your jailbroken iPhone, that let you tether to your normal non-tether dataplan.

(At this point you can happily complain about morale or market issues relating to stealing that bandwidth; for the record: I pay the $20/month and am quite happy to do so.)

True, but there's a big difference between "jailbreaking makes these things possible, where otherwise I would be screwed," and "jailbreaking lets me get things for free that I would otherwise have had to pay for." The GP appeared to be about the former.

However, a data plan that does not allow tethering is a carrier issue, not a phone issue. Here, tethering is included with virtually all data plans, across all of the major carriers.

I think it's sad that you have to root/jailbreak to get this feature OR you have to pay the carriers extra.

My Nokia N9 for instance comes with a wi-fi hotspot preinstalled and I can use it to share internet with other devices without having to pay anything extra. Better yet, I've had feature phones that you could connect with USB to share their internet connection.

This is simply Apple and Google bending over for the carriers. Nokia will do it with WP7 also, I'm sure.

Were you running old versions of iOS? Personal Hotspot has been in it since March, seems odd that iPhone users would not be running at least 4.3 by now.

If you're in the US, that feature will cost you another $240/yr unless you're already on the 4gb data plan.

You can add and remove it on a month to month basis, though, if you only need it intermittently. In any case it's well worth the cost if you do need it, and is much cheaper than other ways of obtaining cellular Internet access.

As far as I understand, you didn't need jailbreaking for this, just unlocking. There is unlocking without jailbreaking, isn't there?

Jailbreaking is useful of course, just your example is not very good.

I could be wrong, but I thought unlocking referred to unlocking the device to all carriers, and jailbreaking to loading on non-Apple sanctioned software (from Cydia primarily).

Right, that's the correct terminology in iPhone land.

Either one will do. If you unlock, you can activate tethering without the carrier's permission. If you jailbreak, you can install a third-party tethering app like MyWi.

Wifi hotspot is a native feature in recent Android versions, which has been disabled by some carriers, but is present in the Google-branded stock Android phones. It works great.

So saying it's not really supposed to be doing this is not really accurate. Your phone IS supposed to be doing that. Only your wireless carrier thinks otherwise.

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