Old iPhones are great for iPods that you can leave in your car/speaker/entertainment center. But, I believe that is kind of where their usefulness ends. I have quite the collection all the way down to the first iPhone (I hate it when it is referred to as 2G). All but one still works (it tried to take a swim). The iPhone5 is probably my favorite design - the later ones were too thin and would taco right on the SIM card connection. Point is - I like apple products, but their implementations are designed to be ādifficultā for non-apple products. Non-apple products typically have to pay royalties for the ability to interface these. Why they do this is no mystery - they can make more money. Comparing Apple to Android is not ideal since one is real big on open source and the other is very proprietary.
Obviously, there is some kind of standard for USB modems. Apple does not follow that standard. Tethering to a windows PC requires special software beyond drivers. Most devices only need a driver. It is the additional application layer (special software) that makes it difficult to interface with the Peplink. That special software requires some sort of API for the driver to talk with the hardware (iPhone). Most device manufacturers follow standard APIs for easy comparability. Easy comparability is not a priority for Apple since they would rather be compatible with other Apple products and āpartnerā products.
Imagine if Apple made electric sockets - do you think they would be fully compatible with every electrical device?they would probably make one of the holes a square and sell that it is more efficient and allows for a smaller form factor.
Android devices are a dime a dozen, but if you are looking for a device for internet connectivity - the mifi devices are definitely the way to go for this type of backup WAN solution.
I agree it would be nice if connecting the iPhone could be an option, but I understand why Peplink would choose to invest in other tech instead. Too many hoops to jump through with Apple. No telling how much time it took to develop the bonjour forwarding feature that we have in our Peplinks. that dev process may be why they donāt want to mess with Apple specific stuff anymore.
Any update on this? I was just trying to do this the other day. It would be awesome to have this feature in an emergency when you want to get an OOB connection going for troubleshooting and all you have is an iPhone (or Android).
Thread moved to Product Discussion / Feature Requests
& +1 for this as this can be very useful in remote support situations with Balance Routers, in Australia we have one of the highest ratio of iOS devices per head of population in the world.
Hello @TK_Liew
Is there any update on the possibility of this feature request?
We found another article on how to do this with Linux for iOS devices. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IPhone_tethering#Tethering_over_USB
To us, this is not a high priority, more a nicety when it comes to doing remote support.
Happy to Help,
Marcus
FYI in case this adds a bit more fuel to the fire, I find that hooking up an iPad for its cellular hot spot support works far better than the mifi devices which I have tried. This first became apparent when travelling overseas when I compared the cell phone reception on various mifi devices to the cell phone reception and data throughput on my iPad, all using the same SIM card. So now I just pop the local countryās SIM card into my iPad. While I havenāt tried all mifi devices, I would rather connect my iPad or iPhone as a usb tethered modem than a mifi device.
Add my name to the list too, please. It may not seem like a very wanted feature, but if you put a poll out there I think there would be overwhelming interest.
Iāve been using speedify (www.speedify.com) to bond a few connections together. You can plug in a couple of different sources (including iPhones) into your computer and it will bond them all together exactly like speedfusion does. It only works for one machine, but if you are doing something mission critical like an important video call, it works great
No connection to speedify, I paid full retail for it, but it saved me several times when I was in dodgy coverage areas and is the only good solution until Peplink sees this feature as important.
Hello Peplink Engineering Team,
Again, I am bringing this Feature Request back into the light; this Feature Request has been running for over ten (10) years (since 2012), longer than Iāve known @Alex and the Peplink team.
During 2023, a customer had some provisioning issues with two SDX units in HA mode, both having lost connectivity (due to human/customer error in the configuration after our teamās delivery). The customer support people all had iPhones; I think they talked the security guard into borrowing their Android device and, that way, allowed our team to gain InContol2 access so we could restore the devices remotely.
Do the newer Peplink Series-X models have enough capacity to support this Feature Request for tethering via iPhones using the USB connection?
Note: We have often, when travelling, used the USB port on a Peplink BR2 Pro 5G or Peplink MBX MINI 5G as a charging source for our teamās mobile phones, including iPhones.
This morning the two fiber WAN links are gone due to traffic works in the street
USB dongle is down because I didnāt controled it since last update to 8.4.1
We do not have WiFi here
We have iphone and would be happy to be able to plug it, but no way
So we used an old Rasbperry Pi to link the iphone and present it to the peplink router through RJ45. It works, but we put money on peplink to avoid such things. The more I have skills to drive my own network and the less I need a peplink router to accomplish this.
This is a very old feature request, having wireguard is also an old one too. I believe most of us are dealing with it outside peplink now. Sometimes, just saying: āwe wonāt doā is better than leave people think it will comeā¦ one day.
Any updates on this? The majority of our US customers that we serve have iPhones and this would be a great option to allow backup service so we can gather device diagnostics if the primary connection goes down.
