I sort of have broadband, if you can call it that. It’s all of 128 to 200 kb/s via cellular. The cellular adapter is a PC card in a XP laptop, the cellular connection comes up as a dialup connection in the network connections.
OK here is what I would like to be able to do:
Connect other laptops to the internet through this computer via this computers wireless connection - this is mainly for the occasional visitor who just wants to connect to check email, not to run a office network . I’m pretty sure I can eventually figure this out, but any hints would be appreciated, like do I need a wireless accesspoint/hub or can I broadcast directly from my laptop to theirs without any extra hardware?
Question # 2 is would it be possible to run a IP phone using this setup, such as Vonnage? Can the Vonnage phone router/modem work with a wireless signal (even with additional hardware to convert it to eithernet? Would the delay going from the laptop to WiFi to hard wired again be too much of a delay?
A wireless network is just a network as far as your computer cares. I am pretty sure XP (and probably earlier Windows versions too) has a facility to share a modem connection over a local network so should work here too. Never used this facility myself so don’t know how to do it.
Know even less about this but wireless access points (the wireless network box thingy) generally have a regular Ethernet port on them to connect to wired netwok, so why not? – Oh, and the delay will be very small in human terms so I don’t see why it should affect IP phone
You will need to set up an ad-hoc wireless network and setup internet connection sharing, I dont think you can feed any typical consumer routers a wireless connection on the WAN side and route to the machine with Internet connection sharing.
ICS can probably get a vonage to fire up hardwired but I don’t think a wireless system is in the stars here.
I’m still experimenting with getting 2 computers connected with a ad-hoc network, but no success with ICS yet.
I assume you mean VoIP (or internet telephone service), according to Vonage web site 90 kb/s up/down is recommended. The speed of the service does range quite a bit but never dipped below that number, so I assume that it is fast enough.
That’s what I think too. It looks like I would have to set up a separate computer and install the cellular internet connection PC card in that, using a hardwired connection from that computer to the VoIP equipment and use WiFi to connect my laptop., which means that though it may be possible it’s not practical.
I was in your same situation not long ago and got it working without much trouble. I was stuck with an actual dial-up connection, but since you say your wireless connection shows up in windows as dial-up, I’ll assume things will work the same.
All you need to do is set up internet connection sharing on the dial-up account, this will set the IP address of the computer to 192.168.0.1. Then get yourself a wireless access point, configure it so that it has an IP address in the same range, 192.168.0.x (it can’t be .1 as thats used, and shouldn’t be low numbers as they will be used later - something like .200) and also make sure that it is not set up to give out DHCP ip addresses.
After doing that any other computer should be able to connect to your internet connection just by searching for a wireless network and clicking connect (although of course you shouldn’t have unsecured wireless, so they’d have to put your WEP code). When they connect your computer will assign them an IP address and off they go surfing the net.
This is more than likely possible to set up without a wireless router - you could set up an ad-hoc network as you said, but it would always be problematic and I don’t think it’d be worth it.
As for your second question about the IP phone I’m not 100% sure how they work, but my WAG is that these things are set up to just plug into your router, and with this setup it should pick up the same internet connection as if you were connecting a computer to the network.
No, everything is on the one network here, 192.168.0.x, well I suppose the cellular internet connection is another network, but ICS takes care of that. ICS is sharing that internet connection with the rest of your network, which basically is bridging.