July 8th, 2008
I recently had the chance to play with an iPhone running the developer preview version of the iPhone 2.0 firmware. Aside from the AppStore, the feature I was most excited to try out was the built-in Cisco VPN client (my university’s Wifi access is restricted to clients connected to a Cisco VPN network).
Impressions and Issues
The first issue that caught my attention was the difficulty of entering your connection details manually: Don’t get me wrong: I have very few issues with the iPhone’s keyboard when entering normal words. But entering the 30 digit pre-shared key took me the best part of 10 minutes.
Luckily, according to this deployment scenario document (warning PDF link) the final release will be able to import a pre-defined, password protected connection file - just like VPN connection files can be deployed en-masse to Cisco desktop clients, so most users will probably never have to manually edit their connection details.
Once I had everything set up and running, the connection seemed to work just fine and browsing speeds seemed to be just as fast over VPN as they were on a regular Wifi connection.
Summary
Everything basically worked as advertised and I look forward to finally being able to really put my iPhone to use at University without having to rely on a slow GPRS/EDGE connection.
P.S. Conspiracy alert! Does anyone else remember that “iPhone” trademark spiff Apple and Cisco had last year? I wonder if that’s why Cisco is the only IPSec VPN gateway manufacturer to be supported on the device. At least the last sentence of the press release seems to imply some sort of closed-door deal:
In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications. Other terms of the agreement are confidential.
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