How To Use Blackberry As A Modem For Mac

I was curious to see if I could stop paying Verizon $60/month for my Verizon wireless card.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love that little thing because it’s saved me countless dollars at hotels, airports, conferences, etc.

So I googled and found this post: Pair your Bluetooth and Mac to use BlackBerry as a modem

There’s a nice video showing how to connect/pair BB with Mac via bluetooth.

But then I noticed a reference to this post How To Tether Your Mac to BB which notes that Verizon customers have to pay $10 a month.

Certainly, that’s cheaper than $60/month.  But I didn’t really want to call and talk to VZ customer service, change up my contract, etc. just to see how fast the connection was going to be.

I also noticed that all those posts were about 2+ years old.  Surely, there’s got to be some newer stuff out there, right?

So I searched Blogs, which sorts results by relevancy AND age.  Nice!

That led me to Using Your Blackberry As A Modem, where I read about an app called Tether.

Tether costs $50 (one time fee), but it uses your existing data plan to connect, so no expenses to VZ.  Cool!

Plus, Tether offers a free 7 day trial and a 30 day money-back guarantee.

So I downloaded Tether, paired my Mac to my BB, turned off Airport, connected Tether on BB to Tether on Mac — AND IT WORKED!

However, it was slow.  Really slow.  Just a little bit faster than a 14.4K modem.  And my BB showed 5 bars of connectivity.  Here’s my speedtest results using Tether via Bluetooth:

Presumably, the USB connection is faster, but according to Tether, you can’t tether in USB mode if you have Blackberry Desktop Manager for Mac.

There are two options available for you:

1. To uninstall BlackBerry Desktop Manager to use the USB Mode
2. Use the Bluetooth Mode.

Tether says they are working on this, but that’s a bummer since I use BB Desktop Manager, I can’t uninstall it.

I was curious what my speedtest would be using my Verizon Wireless card in the same location, and with only two bars of connectivity, it really wasn’t *that* much faster than Tether.

With all 4 bars on the Verizon Wireless Card, I’m usually at about 2.5mbps download speed.  (Compare that to 19mbps on Cox cable.)

Tether claims the following:

How fast is the internet with your software?
Based on customer feedback, we have heard speeds as high as 2,400 kbps.

2,400 kbps = 2.5 mbps…  so…  maybe Tether is a good option for using your Blackberry as a modem for your computer after all, as long as you can uninstall BB Desktop Manager and connect via USB.