IP Passthrough (Nokia Network Bridge) is a tool that allows you to connect your nokia mobile phone to the internet via the USB cable and your PC.
This is good because you don’t need a data plan and the associated costs for your mobile.
It has a couple of “gotcha”s:
– the PC (or laptop) MUST be connected to the internet via wire. It doesn’t work with WiFi.
– the PC (or laptop) MUST be running Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
It hasn’t worked for me, as yet, because:
– my laptop has XP but uses a WiFi connection to the net, and
– the desktop has Vista on it.
Installing on Vista with Admin rights doesn’t solve the problem. It uses a legacy Control Panel Application that may rely on underlying OS details that have changed.
If you have a recent model mobile phone, you can probably connect using WiFi to your home, office, or other WiFi network for internet access.
If your phone is an older model without WiFi, the options are:
– get the above (or a similar product) working with vista or 7,
– plug the laptop into the router/modem with a cable, or
– get a mobile data plan.
The last option is the long term solution. In this era of cloud-based computing, it no longer makes sense to have a device that doesn’t connect to the cloud.
