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Doing Work via 3G Tethering...Possible?

F

FearoftheNight

Diamond Member
Hi guys! I have a Droid X2 with 3g Tethering. I also have a job that may require me to be on call at all times. Anyone know if it would be possible to get some work done via the 3g on my phone? I may need to vpn into our network to use our case management web interface and maybe interface with a database or two. Would my 3g be sufficient to do this for a few minutes?
 
I've used VPN over a tethered AT&T connection to access a web interface. It was a bit sluggish, but it worked fine.
 
Ive used tethering on my brothers droid x when we moved to a new place. Service was pretty good since we live in a really coverage area. Think speedtested arounded 2mbps.
 
3G has horrible latency, in range 300ms and over. That would make everything laggy. Your mileage may vary, I know that 3G isn't the same everywhere. I have never seen 2Mbps on 3G.
 
Verizon 3G is significantly slower than AT&T 3G, though also rather more reliable in major urban areas.

If you're in an LTE market, that's *much* faster and has excellent latency.
 
I had a similar job that required on call work, and I used a tethered connection quite a few times. Its certainly not as good as a standard connection, but its good enough to do the job.
 
postmortemIA said:
3G has horrible latency, in range 300ms and over. That would make everything laggy. Your mileage may vary, I know that 3G isn't the same everywhere. I have never seen 2Mbps on 3G.
Click to expand...

Yea, it isn't so much the speed of 3G that really makes it a PITA to work over, its the latency (at least in my experience).

Although. On my OG Droid:

101ms 1.3Mbps down, 0.74Mbps up. [3G]
vs
84ms 4.5Mbps down, 2.5Mbps up. [Comcastic]

Although it is like 1:20AM here, so that might not be typical during the day.
 
I spent several weeks visiting my parents on the east cost this past summer- picture old schoolers with dial up, no wifi anywhere nearby.

I was pleasantly surprised using my DroidX and 3G tethered to my laptop using EasyTether software. I didn't waste time measuring the speed, but it was very usable- my laptop felt much faster using the 3G connection than the phone did.

Downloading music, apps, and files worked well. Uploading photos to blogs etc. worked great as well. The biggest surprise for me was that full-blown Logmein on the laptop worked perfectly fine to be usable to interact with my home PCs. Not speedy to be sure, but enough to do needed tasks with.

I wasn't doing actual 'work', but I don't think there's too much I couldn't have accomplished other than dealing with gargantuan media files. I'll never get stuck in the boonies again without a tethering solution, that's for sure.
 
Last edited:
postmortemIA said:
3G has horrible latency, in range 300ms and over. That would make everything laggy. Your mileage may vary, I know that 3G isn't the same everywhere. I have never seen 2Mbps on 3G.
Click to expand...

All depends where you are at.

42575633-6c4b-4863.jpg


I like some others have had success tethering. I have used it when on vacation and when visiting family. I actually used a vpn even and it worked well.
 
i've used vpn/remote desktop on tmobile in seattle, pittsburgh, and washington DC without any issue...all those cities have great coverage though. it all depends where you are, but it is definitely possible.
 
I tethered my netbook to my Droid once. Very slow, but would be fine for checking emails.
Of course, I could just check email on my phone.

Only reason I would do that is if I happened to have my netbook on the road, and I knew for a fact I needed to check my school site for something. Its heavily Flash based, and of course Flash is crap on most phones.
 
Yes, it's possible, but why would you want to? If you are in an area with LTE coverage, and you are already paying inflated service fees to one of the major carriers, it makes sense to get a 4G device ASAP and start taking advantage of the faster network speeds...
 
gsaldivar said:
Yes, it's possible, but why would you want to? If you are in an area with LTE coverage, and you are already paying inflated service fees to one of the major carriers, it makes sense to get a 4G device ASAP and start taking advantage of the faster network speeds...
Click to expand...

Just guessing if he is asking about 3G, he likely only has 3G...
 
In Chicago, I use my Moto Droid 2's hotspot (Verizon's 3G) on the train. I consistently get somewhere between 400-800kbps down and up. If you know your bits and bytes, this translates to a download speed roughly around 100 kilobytes per second.

It's really not bad. The only deal-breaker would be video latency -- which is horrible over this connection.

Now 4G LTE on VZW is a whole different game... it's faster than my home broadband connection. I don't have it yet though.
 
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