What is Tethering?
Intermediate – Computing
Reading Time – 1 minute, 15 seconds
What is tethering? It’s the technology that allows you to share your mobile phone’s Internet connection with other devices. It is also referred to as a phone-as-modem (PAM). When you don’t have a 3G mobile Internet connection available on your mobile phone or don’t have any access to a Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) connection to connect to the Internet, another device can share its Internet connection to yours. The other devices can be connected to the tethering device via Bluetooth, a USB cable, or a WiFimobile hotspot.
Through the WiFi hotspot, you can connect to the tethering device similar to how you connect to any other WiFi network. Of course, a name and a password should be set to the WiFi hotspot of the tethered device so that other devices know which WiFi to connect to. The tethered connection should also be secured with a security mechanism such as WiFi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) to avoid unauthorized devices in the range gaining access to the tethered Internet connection. The connected devices can use the tethered Internet connection to perform any Internet-related activities such as browsing, downloading files, and streaming videos.
As you may know, Wifi hotspot is the most popular form of tethering as Bluetooth and USB tethering has limitations such as law maximum speed and the number of devices that can be connected. The WiFi hotspot has no specific limit for the number of devices that can be connected to. However, as the number of connected devices increases, the data transfer rate among the connected devices decreases.