Using a smartphone as a VPN Client?

[Shah Saad]

As the phones nowadays have so much processing power with so much RAM, can we use a smartphone as a VPN client ?
By VPN client I mean the one like in Merlin. So that the smartphone is connected to the normal wifi router. The router shall send all the traffic to the smartphone first, the phone shall encrypt it with the help of VPN client app, and send it back to the router, and then it shall go to its destination. Is it possible?

 

[RMerlin]

Phones are not routers.

 

[Shah Saad]

Phones are not routers.

Phones do perform openvpn encryption decryption though.
So it's not possible? Or it's not feasible?

 

[ColinTaylor]

I think the first step would be to simply setup a VPN client on your phone and see what throughput you get. If it's less than what the router can do then it's not worth pursuing. If it is significantly faster then you can start to think about how you might tether it to the router.

 

[Shah Saad]

I think the first step would be to simply setup a VPN client on your phone and see what throughput you get. If it's less than what the router can do then it's not worth pursuing. If it is significantly faster then you can start to think about how you might tether it to the router.

That's a good point. I am living in a remote town where I only get 10Mbps broadband connection. So maybe the throughput won't different from the router at my home. I will check it out.
Thank you.

 

[RMerlin]

Phones do perform openvpn encryption decryption though.
So it's not possible? Or it's not feasible?

My point was that you want the phone to route trafic between two networks. It wasn't designed to do something like that, you cannot customize its routing table.

 

[Shah Saad]

My point was that you want the phone to route trafic between two networks. It wasn't designed to do something like that, you cannot customize its routing table.

Oh okay Got it. Thank you Merlin.