Have you ever wanted to share your 3G data connection with another device? You can easily setup a cabled or bluetooth connection for your notebook or PC. But what you wanted to offer 802.11 wireless connectivity to your friends’ notebooks or mobile phones? Well, there is a free software available that can turn your 3G mobile phone into a 802.11 wireless hotspot. Now you can easily “deploy” wireless internet connectivity wherever you go with just your mobile phone!
It still bills itself as beta, but I chanced upon this software JoikuSpot from Joiku. In its current form, JoikuSpot will provide HTTP and HTTPS access to 802.11 wireless clients by turning supported mobile phones into a 802.11 wireless hotspot. It uses the phone’s data connection for Internet access.
There are clearly a few more “needed” features they’ll have to fix up before this software would be really useful. For example, they will need to implement NAT (network address translation). I believe in its current state, JoikuSpot functions as an application layer proxy. As a result, they currently support only HTTP and HTTPS protocols (the protocols used for web surfing), as it is quite tedious to support every type of application on the Internet. Also, the wireless link is currently unencrypted, but they are expecting to implement WEP/WPA/WPA2 in the final version.
The software may be a bit limited now, but it looks to be good enough to let you share your 3G connection with others for simple web surfing needs.
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