Ramon Ecung's Blog

I installed dd-wrt on my router recently and enabled the PPTP VPN server to provide remote access while I’m on the road. I was able to set up VPN on all of my remote machines and it worked great until I tried from my iPhone. for some reason it could only connect when I was on a wifi network.

After many weeks of Googling I finally found what I thought could be the answer: apparently each device is behind a NAT on he sprint network and isn’t directly addressable via IP. The site that provided that information said Sprint needed to add “FROUTIP” provisioning to my data plan, but after calling in and talking to two groups (both of which didn’t know what an Internet routable IP was, yes it was a painful conversation when they asked and I was trying to achieve! it turns out I needed a static IP on my line.

It didn’t make sense at the time but upon further reflection I suppose it would make sense that having a static IP would expose my device to the Internet as opposed to sitting behind a NAT. I think what was throwing me off was the term “static IP”.

the service costs $3/month, fairly cheap but not free and worth checking out if you’re running into VPN issues on your Sprint device.