Tether Your iPhone With Your Laptop Using The USB Cable
This quick guide shows you how to tether your iPhone with your laptop using the USB cable to use the iPhone’s 3G internet connection. Once it is configured, getting connected is fast, as is the internet connection. You can also use any application without configuring the proxy settings for the apps.
A simple test on www.speedtest.net gives the results below.
When I’m in an area with better 3G coverage it’s even faster!
Note: This works on Windows and requires iTunes to be installed. If you find a better alternative to anything in this guide please leave a comment and let me know.
Prepare your iPhone
- Jailbreak your iPhone: Use Quickpwn or winpwn. I prefer Quickpwn.
- Launch Cydia and Install openSSH. The default username is root. The default password is alpine. Make sure you change the default password.
- This step is optional. Install BossPrefs from Cydia. This will allow you to toggle SSH on and off.
Prepare your laptop
- Install the iPhone Tunnel Suite http://www.makkiaweb.net/itunnel/. Go to the install directory, the default is C:\Program Files\iPhone Tunnel Suite\iTunnel, and create a shortcut to iTunnel.exeshortcut and place it on your desktop.
You will need to add two arguments to the shortcut. Your shortcut should look like this:
"C:\Program Files\iPhone Tunnel Suite\iTunnel\iTunnel.exe" 22 22
- Download Putty and place it in your C:\windows directory
- Create a text file on your desktop named iPhone.bat. This will create an SSH tunnel to the iPhone. In the iPhone.bat file, type
start putty -D 8080 -P 22 -ssh 127.0.0.1 -l root -pw YourPassword
- Install Proxifier from proxifier.com. Proxifier routes all of the network traffic through the proxy you specifiy (which will be our iPhone). It also makes it convenient for us since we can just launch this application and then start using the iPhone as a proxy without configuring each application we want to use. If you don’t want to use Proxifier, then you have to configure each application to use the proxy, how tedious! To configure Proxifier:
- Open Proxifier
- Go to Options –> Proxy Settings. Click the “Add” button and enter the following:
- Address: 127.0.0.1
- Port: 8080
- Protocol: SOCKS Version 5
- Go to Options –> Name Resolution. Click “Remotely”
Use the connection on your laptop
- Connect your laptop and iPhone with the USB cable.
- If you installed BossPrefs, make sure SSH is turned on.
- Run the iTunnel shortcut on your desktop.
- Run the iPhone.bat file on your desktop. This will open putty and create an SSH session to the iPhone.
- Launch Proxifier.
- On the iPhone make sure you browse to a website within Safari to activate the 3G connection.
- Start browsing on your laptop.
Great guide. Works far better than using on device proxy such as 3proxy since that requires both 3g and wifi to be active. The phone can’t keep up with the charging when tethered user is sucking 3g and piping over wifi to computer. This is a great solution.
See extended guide to tether your iphone via USB cable and vice versa - to get your iphone online via USB cable through Internet-connected PC.
http://alk2blog.blogspot.com
I am having a lot of trouble with itunnel, I can’t get it to stay running. I start it in the cmd prompt and it will intermittently quit? Any suggestions?
Does using SSH slow down the connection, because of encryption/decryption? Is there any better solution without SSH?
I don’t believe SSH will make a noticeable difference in the connection speed.
When I run the .bat file it comes back “Network Error: Connection Refused”………..any help? thanks in advance
I made some changes to the post… I forgot to mention that the needed arguments to iTunnel. Do that, and it should work.
Everything works great, except my napster subscription. Any idea why I can’t stream music through napster???
This does not work for me. I’ve tried it a couple times very carefully.
Still having problems. Getting the “Network error: Connection refused”.
WOW , this is an excellent post!!!!!!! Good Job!!!! took me about an hour to learn ssh, but as long as it works…. and by the way your speed test is amazingly fast!! I only had 455kpbs down! but thats still fast though!
well i’m haveing a lil trouble i swear i followed the directions to the T and it doesn’t help that i have lil experience with this sort of thing i can’t seem to get the iphone.bat file to work properly with putty it keeps poping up saying putty internal error invalid port number i am pretty sure that i did add the arguments correctly for the itunnel short cut not sure if that would have anything to do with it or not but if so tell me how to do it and i will see if i did it right thanks again in advance
Make sure iTune and Bonjour is installed before trying this method
Great tutorial, but the thing with proxyfier doesn’t work for me, i must set up the proxy configuration for every single application, that connects to the internet. Any idea, what is wrong on my pc? i set up the configuration as described above.