Blackberry Tethering
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
This is part 4 in our series profiling the latest iPass Open Mobile for Windows update. In this blog entry, we are going to take a closer look at the new BlackBerry Tethering support now available with Open Mobile for Windows.
One trend that we’ve seen from our customers is a general desire to leverage a mobile broadband data subscription on multiple devices, mainly to be more efficient with the amount of data subscriptions you subscribe to on a monthly basis. One increasingly popular method to accomplish this is through smartphone tethering.
The challenge with tethered connections is ensuring the Open Mobile recognizes the tethered device as a legitimate connection option and then also applies the right connection policies and provides the right level of insight into that connection for reporting purposes. This can be even more challenging because all smartphones exhibit different behavior when tethered. While Open Mobile worked with several different smartphones for tethered connections, one important platform what was missing up to now was support for tethered connections to Blackberry smartphones.
The Open Mobile for Windows now supports connections via a tethered BlackBerry smartphone device. How does it work? It really is quite simple for the user.
The user connects their BlackBerry device to their Windows laptop, and Open Mobile will then show the BlackBerry device as an available 3G connection. Depending on the auto-connect policy, Open Mobile will either automatically establish the connection when the BlackBerry device is tethered, or the user will select the ‘Connect’ option from the Open Mobile client. It really is that easy. All Connect/Disconnect, VPN Launch and Post-Connect policies are supported. All usage statistics will appear as 3G statistics with the Mobile Insight reports.
There are a few items that administrators should be aware of when considering this feature for your users:
- The BlackBerry Desktop software must be installed on the user’s Windows device
- The BlackBerry device itself must be on a carrier plan that supports tethering- this is usually an add-on service that must be enabled
- The 3G roaming policies available via the Open Mobile portal do not apply for tethered connections
- Also note that voice connections will not work while the BlackBerry device is tethered
This is a great new feature that is part of the Open Mobile Client for Windows 1.4.1 release. Support for tethered BlackBerry devices provides our customers with a great option for consolidating mobile data requirements from multiple devices to a single device, potentially reducing costs and adding efficiencies for your organization.
Did you know? Open Mobile already supports connections from a tethered iPhone or a Android Smartphone? As described above, the tethered device does need to be on a data plan that supports tethering.
For the previous posts:
Tags: 3G network, Blackberry
