I'm working on a project where I want my Droid 2 to be able to send and receive data over 3G, to a device connected to an ethernet port (not necessarily a PC, but I'm using this for testing the communication). I believe that eventually the end to end communication will be accomplished over an SSL tunnel, but for right now, I just need to establish basic communication to show that the devices can communicate.

I've written some client/server applications that worked between two computers on the same network, but I'm not sure if the communication in this case will work because of the different networks that the phone and PC are on.

I've been trying to establish if this can be done by pinging some of the PCs at my University and house using a pinging program I got off the market, but I've had no success so far. However, my friend has rooted his phone, and was able to do so.

I suppose this question really has two parts: 1) Is this possible? and 2) Do I need to root my phone to accomplish this, or should I be able to do it without rooting?

Thanks for any responses.