Help USB tethering being blocked?

[tpladow]

Recently got the Thunderbolt and installed the latest update (released on 7/9/11). Trying to get tethering working with pdanet, easytether, and/or klink.

Here's the weird thing: I can get all of these tethering programs to work just fine. The only problem is that after about 5-10 minutes of browsing from my PC, all internet connectivity stops (web pages can't load, e-mails time out, hostnames don't resolve, etc). What's more, all internet connectivity on the phone stops too. The signal strength is fine, and it still shows that it's connected to 4G, but I can't access anything internet-related.

If I stop the tethering app, internet connectivity on the phone resumes within ~30 secs. It seems that either the Verizon network or the phone's software knows that I'm tethering and shuts down my connection.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Note 1: I did stop the TetheringGuard service before trying the tethering apps. Perhaps I need this running in order to be able to tether for more than 5-10 mins?

Note 2: Tried both on Windows 7 and XP PCs, same results.

Note 3: Same result when connected to the 3G network.

Thanks in advance for any comments/suggestions.

 

[Danfish98]

I've been tethered via easytether for the past couple hours at least with no problem. I updated on Sunday so we should be on the same version. Maybe try rebooting the phone and see if that fixes it

 

[tpladow]

I've been tethered via easytether for the past couple hours at least with no problem. I updated on Sunday so we should be on the same version. Maybe try rebooting the phone and see if that fixes it

Thanks for the suggestion. A reboot seems to now let me connect for ~20 mins, but then it starts doing it again (no connectivity on PC or phone). Happens every time. Very weird.

 

[IRuninCircles]

I have been using EasyTether with no issues, stays connected...

 

[notspecial]

Thanks for the suggestion. A reboot seems to now let me connect for ~20 mins, but then it starts doing it again (no connectivity on PC or phone). Happens every time. Very weird.

You might want to verify that the connection to the phone from your PC is still alive when things freeze up. With all of those apps, you can just ping the gateway address (the phone) from a Windows command prompt.

If that checks out, you might also want to load up Firefox and a user agent switcher extension. Have it masquerade as an Android browser to see if the time limit kicks in.

 

[tpladow]

Thanks everyone for the replies. Been tethered for two hours now, 1 hour with EasyTether and 1 hour with pdanet (still going).

I can't yet say what exactly was the culprit. All I did was turn off many non-essential apps (both on the phone and PC). At some point, I may try turning these back on one-by-one to help narrow things down.

Here's what I turned off:

(1) Auto-sync on the phone
(2) Pandora on the phone

As far as I can tell, there are no other apps on the phone actively accessing the internet.

(3) Google sidebar on the PC
(4) Dropbox on the PC
(5) NetMeter on the PC

First tried with FireFox w/ User Agent extension set to an Android profile--worked. Then tried with the default profile--still worked. Then tried Chrome--still worked. Also have Thunderbird running in the background.

So, it's either a fluke or one of the five items listed above that caused the connectivity issues.

Now, can someone tell me why USB tethering is so much slower than internet on the phone? I get 15+ Mbps DL on the phone, but only 4 Mbps DL with pdanet and 1 Mbps DL with EasyTether. Puzzling.

Thanks again for the assistance.

 

[notspecial]

Now, can someone tell me why USB tethering is so much slower than internet on the phone? I get 15+ Mbps DL on the phone, but only 4 Mbps DL with pdanet and 1 Mbps DL with EasyTether. Puzzling.

Thanks again for the assistance.

The performance of those apps is heavily dependent on your computer if you're running Windows. (Apparently, the Android USB software is not so efficient under some Windows configurations. OS X and Linux are fine, however, based on my experience.) If you load up the Windows task manager, you'll probably see a PdaNet/EasyTether/adb executable eating up cpu cycles whenever you perform a high-speed transfer.


Regarding speed, someone on XDA has benchmarked several of the popular apps with a Droid Charge and found that it is indeed possible to get 4g speeds with such programs:


USB Tether Speed Test Comparison - xda-developers


PdaNet, ET, and Klink all do pretty well. Klink does a bit better, but that's probably because it's written in C, not Java.

 

[tpladow]

The performance of those apps is heavily dependent on your computer if you're running Windows. <snip>
PdaNet, ET, and Klink all do pretty well. Klink does a bit better, but that's probably because it's written in C, not Java.

Many thanks for the info. Will try Klink.