Nokia N800 and Tethering with Cingular or T-Mobile

I’ve gotten a few reports from people that are trying to tether their Nokia N800 phone to Cingular: it doesn’t work. The main reason for this is that when you use the wizards on the Nokia N800 to configure connectivity with your Bluetooth phone, if you select Cingular, the GPRS access point that is chosen cannot be used by most subscribers. It works okay if you have, for instance, one of the “PDA” data plans, but may not work for “MEdia Works” and the like. However, it is a relatively simple matter of changing the access point to one that works.

From the application menu, select Tools > Control Panel. Under Connectivity heading, find Connectivity. Click on the Connections button. In the list of Connections you should see something like Cingular Internet. Select that and click on Edit. Click on Next and you should see a screen like the following:

Now you will need to change the following fields if you are a Cingular customer:

• Access point name: WAP.CINGULAR
• Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM

The password should be the same, but if you need to re-enter it for some reason, it is CINGULAR1.

For T-Mobile (US) customers, the Access point name is internet.voicestream.com, internet2.voicestream.com, or internet3.voicestream.com depending on your specific data plan. The username and password fields are blank in all cases.

Click Finish. Now the next time you attempt to tether your phone, it should work. If it doesn’t work, power cycle your phone and try again.