Wifi as WAN
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So a friend of mine gave me a interesting networking challenge.
Both him and his roommate have T-Mobile android phones.
They want to be able to use the WiFi Hotshot Function as a WAN connection for a wireless router.
The tricky part is they want to be able to use ether phone, or both as the WAN connection. Sometimes only one of them is home, etc.
Thoughts?
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So let me reword this as this is a little confusing, at least to me, and see if I repeat back what you intend to do....
Your friends want to use 3G/4G as their WAN connection (e.g. they don't want to pay for cable or fiber or whatever since they already have some phones.)
So they want to use their phone(s) as wireless bridges to convert the 4G WAN link to a WiFi Lan link using the hotspot functionality. Then they want to have a wireless router that takes the Wifi signal from the phones, firewalls and NATs it and supplies a mix of WiFi and switched Ethernet on the other side?
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If you intend to do what I described, that is completely feasible. What you need, however, is a wireless router, not what people call a wireless router incorrectly (a wired router with an access point added on on the LAN side.) No one sells a true wireless router on the mass market (I'm not even sure that they exist but I suspect that they do.)
So what you will need to do is to build one. You'll need a machine to use as a router/firewall. Something like pfSense or SmoothWall or VyOS should work well. Then you need two wireless cards for it, one of the WAN side and one for the LAN side (or add extra APs, however you want to tackle that.)
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Or...
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Actually never mind, they've tripled in price compared to when I used them.
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I was hoping that this is something I could handle with a common router and ddwrt
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@anonymous said:
I was hoping that this is something I could handle with a common router and ddwrt
I doubt it since you will probably need two radios. Not sure if DD-WRT has any capabilities like that to do a hairpin on the wifi, but it seems unlikely.
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Preface: This is probably not going to work, likely due to my poor understanding of networking (especially internet connection sharing which has rarely worked nicely for me in the past)
Cellphone1 or 2 set to share internet, connected through USB to computer1
Computer1 NIC1 connected to WAN of cheap router, set to share internet connection through NIC1
Computer2 and Computer1 WIFI connected to cheap router to get local IP's + intertubes
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Will the phones do wireless tethering via USB? That would be handy. Especially if they would do it to something other than Windows.
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What about a wireless brigde connect the wan port of a standard wifi router? Phone connects to bridge, router works like normal.
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@anonymous said:
What about a wireless brigde connect the wan port of a standard wifi router? Phone connects to bridge, router works like normal.
Maybe, I wish that I had a diagram of this to make it clearer....
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@scottalanmiller said:
@anonymous said:
What about a wireless brigde connect the wan port of a standard wifi router? Phone connects to bridge, router works like normal.
Maybe, I wish that I had a diagram of this to make it clearer....
Can I make one on my iPhone?
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So you have a wireless to Ethernet bridge. The phone does 4G to WiFi bridging. The bridge connects to the phone. The router will connect to the bridge, request DHCP, the phone will hand out an IP address. That might work.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So you have a wireless to Ethernet bridge. The phone does 4G to WiFi bridging. The bridge connects to the phone. The router will connect to the bridge, request DHCP, the phone will hand out an IP address. That might work.
I think so
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Seems like it will work as long as the bridge allows you to connect to the phone's WiFi. Have one handy to test?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Will the phones do wireless tethering via USB?
My Nexus5 will do USB tethering far faster and more reliably than it does WiFi
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That's not surprising. WiFi always introduces latency and complication. If you can avoid it, that is ideal.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's not surprising. WiFi always introduces latency and complication. If you can avoid it, that is ideal.
Bridges seem kinda of costly. Couldn't I do the same thing with 2 routers?
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One router in client mode, and one as a normal router?
