Tether Your Sprint Mogul with Windows XP

Tether Your Sprint Mogul with Windows XP

I wrote a short article previously about how to tether the Sprint Mogul/HTC PPC-6800 with Ubuntu.  I’ve had to switch back to Windows XP Pro with SP3 sometimes, and this weekend, while at a Marriott I found that I was having difficulty tethering.

A bit more background info.  I have ROM version 3.56.651.0, and have recently done a hard-reset to restore the device to default settings.  When I tried to tether it with Windows XP, my Mogul’s “Internet Sharing” program would stop at “Waiting for Connections” and that’s it.  At this point, my Mogul has assigned a valid dynamic IP (192.168.0.2), and I can ping from my WinXP to my Mogul, but can’t get packets flowing through Sprint’s network.

I looked back at the aforementioned article, and remembered that I did read somewhere a while ago that Sprint has made it difficult for the average user to simply tether and surf using their wireless network without purchasing one of their mobile broadband plans.  It is actually pretty easy to take care of this minor problem by changing a registry setting on the Mogul.  This change is the same as outlined in step 2 in the article, and I’ll repeat it here for your convenience.

There are couple of ways to modify your Mogul’s registry.  I downloaded a free WM program called PHM Registry Editor (v0.70) from here. Once the app is installed on your Mogul, fire it up and browse to My Device->HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->Comm->Internet Sharing->Setings.  There is a registry key named “ForceCellConnection” which is currently set to “Phone as Modem”.  Change it to “Sprint PCS”.  Save your registry settings and quit the program.  You may need to soft-reset your Mogul, too.

Of course, if your network isn’t Sprint, “ForceCellConnection” should not be set to “Sprint PCS”.  When I was in Taiwan earlier this year, I was able to tether and surf with a HTC Touch Cruise on Chunghwa Telecom’s 3.5G HSDPA without any modifications to the ROM downloaded from the carrier’s website.  I don’t know about other carriers in Europe, where I suspect many users are interested in tethering their PPC-6800 (which I believe is essentially the same phone).  Please leave a feedback if you have questions or comments.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *