For those of you who don't know yet, internet tethering means the possibility of using your iDevice as a modem to connect a PC/laptop/Mac to the internet. The Internet will work based on the data connection available through the telephone network to which you are connected and the browsing speed will depend primarily on the type of connection (EDGE/3G) but also on the strength of the signal in the location where you are. For a few days I had the misfortune of connecting to the Internet using the mobile data network of those from Orange and the internet tethering option in iOS. All these days I was connected to the 3G network and I constantly had 4 lines of signal, so a very good signal, not excellent but good enough to allow me to surf the Internet at 1-2 Mbps.
Unfortunately, my experience with Internet from Orange was a very, very bad one, that is, 80% of the time the Internet went very, very hard, the pages were very, very difficult to load, it is practically unusable for daily use on a computer. The internet worked most of the time at speeds below 1MB (more precisely somewhere around 3-400Kbits), but in the evening it became almost unusable until around 12 o'clock. There were also good moments when the internet worked well, but that happens only around 8 in the morning and it didn't last too long because around 9 everything was back to "normal". I want to mention that during use there are many moments when everything freezes, practically you can't load any page and these moments are quite frequent.
I don't know how the Internet from Orange works on the dedicated modems, but through Internet tethering the experience is terrible and I don't recommend you to use something like this unless it is the last solution. This was my experience with this service, so it is purely subjective. I don't know how Internet tethering from Orange will work for you, but I used it/I use it in Iasi in an area with 4 signal lines on 3G. I used an iPhone 3GS all the time, but I also connected to the Internet from iPhone 4 and the situation was identical.
The purpose of this article was to inform you about how internet tethering works on the iPhone on Orange. I don't know how it works on Vodafone/Cosmote, but the situation is just as bad on Digi Mobil.
