Got a 3G iPhone!

And I only waited in line one hour today! We got there an hour before opening, and were in the first batch to get in (I was the LAST person of the first batch!) After getting in I was in the store maybe an hour, and that was WITH some trouble porting my number. The thing I'm MOST excited about hacking soon is running the phone as a bridge / gateway / modem so I can "tether" it to my laptop to get HSDPA wherever I go! Alright, lets be honest, their 3G coverage sucks outside of big cities, but at least I won't ever be stranded without EDGE, aka connectivity anywhere. Hell, if AT&T doesn't catch wind of this, I might even drop my cable internet service.

There is something funny about still calling it "tethering" though, because these days the process is over wifi. It goes something like this: you jailbreak your iPhone (waiting on pwnageTool release), then install the requisite software on it to get it to forward traffic from HSDPA->802.11b. Then you just connect the iPhone and your laptop in an ad-hoc network and boom, 3G data on you laptop.

Technically speaking, there are several ways to achieve this at various layers of the protocol stack. If done as a purely L2, bidirectional forwarding mechanism, you have a bridge/AP type of setup. If the IP layer does this, you kind of a have a router/gateway setup. If done at the application layer, its like a proxy server. The easiest route on the iPhone is to do things at the application layer, because adding functionality to the data-link and network layer requires changes to drivers and the kernel code. Since not many are in the business (except for Apple) of hacking the XNU kernel code, we run a forwarding application at L5. I hope it is as easy as is described for the old iPhone.