It’s great that your iPhone has a data plan and a killer mobile browser, but when you’re sitting at the airport waiting to catch a plane with your laptop right next to you, wouldn’t it be nice to use your full-on desktop browser? Out of the box your iPhone won’t allow you to tether your EDGE data connection to another computer wirelessly, but with a little ingenuity on your part you’ll be browsing the net on your laptop through your iPhone’s data service in no time.

NOTE: You’re probably asking yourself: “Isn’t the EDGE data network that the iPhone uses SLOW?” Well, yes it is. But if you’re at all like me, sometimes a slow full-screen browsing session is better than slow browsing on the small screen.

I’ve only tested this method on my MacBook Pro, but since SSH is platform independent, this should be a workable solution on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

What You’ll Need

For this guide, you’ll need:

• A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
• A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running     1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
• The OpenSSH iPhone application (I’ll show you how to get this below)
• An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.

Prepare Your iPhone

Assuming you’ve already got Installer.app installed on your iPhone (which you will have installed if you’ve gone through the jailbreak mentioned above), the first thing you need to do is install OpenSSH. So head to your iPhone’s home screen and fire up Installer.app. Now go to the Install tab and tap on System -> OpenSSH and tap the Install button. Once it installs, exit Installer.app.

Start Up Your Ad-Hoc Network

This process differs depending on what operating system you’re using. As I said above, I’ve only tested this on a Mac, but I’ll point to instructions on how to do the same on Windows as well.

f you are using a Mac, just click the Airport icon in your menu bar and click on Create Network. Then just give your network a name and—if you like—a password.

On a Windows PC you’ll need to set up Internet Connection Sharing. You can find instructions for doing so here. Good luck!

Once you create your network, your computer won’t be able to connect wirelessly to any Wi-Fi hotspot, just other devices.

Connect Your iPhone to Your Computer

To get your computer and iPhone talking, you’ll need to connect your iPhone to the ad-hoc network we created above. To do so, go to the Settings application, tap Wi-Fi, and select your ad-hoc network from the list of available networks.

Once you’re connected, tap the blue arrow next to your new network to get info on your connections—namely your IP address. Write that puppy down because you’ll need it in a second.

Connect Your Computer to Your iPhone’s Internet

Now it’s time to make use of the SSH server we installed on our iPhone. From this point on, we’re basically following our previous guide to encrypting your web browsing with an SSH SOCKS proxy. Open up your command line application of choice and enter the following:

ssh -ND 9999 root@YourIPAddress

…where YourIPAddress is replaced with whatever you wrote down above.

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