[SOLVED] Anyone Know how to Use a Phone as Your Home Internet Source?

[feeshta]

Hello everyone. I am in the strange position of wanting to switch away from my home internet, and start using the 4G LTE connection on my phone in it's place. The reason for this is simple. It's simply faster than any available home internet in my area, and as a bonus would be cheaper as well.

I actually pay for 250 MBPS DSL service from Deutsche Telekom here in Germany, but don't get anywhere near that speed. I get around 150 MBPS, but more importantly, I only get around 15-20 MBPS upload speeds. The connection has always felt much slower than the numbers would indicate, often having issues with buffering on video streaming sites etc. I have had technicians out to my home to try to fix it, and they claim there is nothing they can do.

The other day my home internet went out completely, and as I still needed to work, I paid for a day of unlimited on my mobile, a google Pixel 2 XL, and simply tethered it to my PC via USB. The results were surprisingly effective. In fact, it is significantly faster than the DSL connection in practice, and also tests out a bit better on a speed test as well. It gets about 175 MBPS down, and around 45 MBPS up.

As a result of this, I am contemplating switching to an unlimited dataplan, and simply using my phone as my internet source in the home. I'm single and live alone, so there is nobody here when I am gone to worry about. The main hangup is that I have 3 computers that I use somewhat regularly. My main work/internet browsing PC. A Home Theater PC that I use for streaming Netflix etc on my TV, and a laptop I occasionally use for Skype and the like due to the built-in webcam. It would be most convenient if I could simply plug the phone into a router that fed the two desktops via Cat 6, and the laptop wirelessly. The home is wired with Cat 6 in each room, which all feeds to a utility closet. I could make patch connections from there to feed Cat 6 from either the HTPC or Work PC locations to the other, and the router could reside in either of those locations, as the utility closet is not a good spot to plug the phone in.

The problem becomes knowing what to purchase for a router, and how to set it up. I have read that some routers can accept internet from a USB source such as a tethered phone. How would I go about identifying the ones that do? Once I have the required router, is there anything specific that needs to be done to set the router up to function as it normally would each time I plug the phone in? I know I will likely need to select the option for tethering each time I plug the phone in, but is there anything else I should be aware of? any possible pitfalls I am missing?

I look forward to your responses.

 

[SamirD]

So the easiest solution (that also works seamlessly), would be to use a 'gaming adapter' or whatever they call the devices that are designed to connect a lan to a wireless network. This way, you simply connect this adapter to your wan port on your wired router and the adapter will connect to your phone when it is within range (when you're home and hotspot is on). TP-link makes a device that I think would fit the bill:

How to configure TL-WR902AC as Client (new logo) | TP-Link

How to configure TL-WR902AC as Client (new logo)

www.tp-link.com

The challenge may be getting enough speed through this link, but I'm sure putting the phone close to the adapter will do wonders for this.

Otherwise, the cellular router and usb support for cellular is a terrible mess to navigate with a lot of incompatibilities and other issues on anything but cradlepoint devices, which cost a lot.

Hope this helps!

 

[bill001g]

I wonder how long the ISP will offer unlimited tethered service when more people like you use it for their main internet. The ISP does not have unlimited bandwidth on their towers and it does not take a lot of people doing what you propose to eat all their bandwidth. The ISP in the USA pretend to offer these plans but if you read the fine print there are always some form of restrictions. It does not take teenagers long to massive abuse things like this running illegal bit torrents 24/7
Mostly what I am getting at is read the fine print, I would love to have this as a backup for my internet but it not available to me.

In any case your largest issue is using your cell phone to do this. Can you get plans that run on a USB modem for the same price.

There are many routers that support a large list of modems. Third party firmwre like dd-wrt has the largest but I would start with asus and tplink if you want a factory supported option. Many of these routers can also load dd-wrt.
Key here is read the list carefully. You need both the actual hardware to match and the ISP. The actual hardware support is the easy part most issues are related to special software settings that only the ISP can provide and these must be built into the router driver

When you attempt to use a cellphone as a modem it adds to this complexity. There are lists of cell phones that work. Again dd-wrt has the largest list. Maybe the best place to start since if dd-wrt does not support it nothing will.

Using the phone either with a tether or in hotspot mode (as recommended in the above post) tends to be rather inconsistent. It will run fine for hours and then you have to reboot the phone or restart things. Not sure if it is the phone or what. I do know the times we did this for work (they didn't care the data costs) the phones got very hot after long periods of use. I suspect it will have a impact on the life of the phone.

 

[hackster]

I've been using mobile as my main home connection for about a year, I had ADSL before that. It's perfectly good, subject to decent network coverage.

I don't use my phone though, I use a 4G router with the standard home cordless phones (that were the landline phones) plugged into its phone socket. This means we can call out via the unlimited mobile plan using our normal home phones.

It's possible to use your phone's hotspot to connect everything in your house, but it has a few limits, some obvious...

• Nobody else will be able to use the internet or phone if you go out and take your phone
• Your phone will need to be on charge all the time
• You will get a slower data rate than you would with a 4G router
• Your phone may severely limit how many devices you can connect
• You won't be able to configure much, e.g. reserved/static LAN IP addresses etc

I did initially try doing this with my mobile, and it worked surprisingly well. There's no harm in trying it then getting a 4G router later. I did find that my phone got quite warm while using the laptop, especially if doing a lot of uploading. Google Docs seemed to make it quite toasty, presumably there's a lot of two-way traffic involved. Definitely don't keep it in a case.

I got (very roughly) about 20Mb download with my phone, 30Mb with a router using its internal antenna and now get 50-60Mb using the same router connected to directional antennas in the loft, pointed very accurately at the base station. It's an absolutely rock-solid connection, just as good as wired.

The one and only issue is that I've found that there's a bit of a lag on voice calls. It's not a big deal, but it's more than normal. My guess is that the DECT phone adds a bit of delay as does the mobile connection. Either on its own wouldn't be noticeable, but added together it is. I've worked around this by having a corded phone on my desk that I use if I want to make a long involved call.

I know the networks once considered this sort of thing an abuse of their service, but that's definitely changed. EE and Three, networks in the UK, will supply you a home router as part of one of their packages, so clearly they're very happy to take your money for this service. I don't know whether they'd cope if everyone did it, presumably they'd put their prices up or landline prices would drop if this happened.

 

[hackster]

Oh, and if it's a factor, the best feature for us was that we were about to move house. I tried it so that I could ignore the wired broadband speed of houses we were considering, some out in the countryside have terrible ADSL speeds but excellent 4G. You need to check per house but it's generally much better, especially if anywhere near a trunk road.

It makes moving house extremely easy - you just unplug, move, plug it in and you're up and running. It's a perfect solution for tenants, students or people who move frequently.

 

[hackster]

Oh, also it reverts to 3G when making a phone call. I get around 3Mb/1Mb while on the phone instead of 50Mb/30Mb. This will change as networks implement VoLTE, at the moment my router would support it if I manually hack-updated its firmware, but the network I'm with doesn't support it anyway so there's no point in trying it.

It automatically switches to 3G as soon as you make or receive a call, then reverts back to 4G after. There's perhaps a second of no connection, short enough that you don't get error messages in your web browser or whatever. YouTube plays smoothly through the process, as it caches enough data to keep going.

 

[feeshta]

About to head to bed, but I appreciate the responses so far. Just to answer a few of your questions. I did consider using a 4G modem, but Telekom requires an entire separate contract per device, so that would cost around 80 Euro per month. I also asked very specifically about throttling, etc, and was informed that it is illegal in Germany to use the term " unlimited" unless it is exactly that. Hopefully they are being honest there.

 

[hackster]

80 Euro per month? Crikey, is that what it costs where you are? Have you checked other providers, or even what price your current one offers new customers?

It depends on how much usage you'd need on your mobile if you had a separate unlimited account at home. If you'd need 2x unlimited then it will be expensive.

I have 1x unlimited for home that costs all of £20 (23.50 Euro) per month. I don't need unlimited for my mobile - obviously it uses the wifi from the 4G router while I'm at home - so that costs £6 per month for 3GB (with up to 3 years rollover), which is plenty for me while out and about.

 

[hackster]

From the mad ideas department, an option for using your mobile could be a wifi extender, that way you could put your phone where it gets the best mobile signal and the extender reasonably close to your computer etc. You'd have two wifi networks, one for your LAN and another exclusively for the phone-extender connection. If you get one with a wired LAN socket you could plug your PC directly into it. In fact you could plug in a network switch, or possibly even a router if you want more control and configuration of your network, in which case you'd disable the extender's own wifi and use the router's.

 

[hang-the-9]

About to head to bed, but I appreciate the responses so far. Just to answer a few of your questions. I did consider using a 4G modem, but Telekom requires an entire separate contract per device, so that would cost around 80 Euro per month. I also asked very specifically about throttling, etc, and was informed that it is illegal in Germany to use the term " unlimited" unless it is exactly that. Hopefully they are being honest there.

It should be illegal everywhere to use that term unless it's exactly that LOL It's a sad thing that companies can define words to mean different things to them depending on the country.

I think someone should drive around companies with a dictionary and stick the CEOs noses in the page where they define unlimited.

Without a separate device you will need to either tether your phone to a computer then share that connection or create a hotspot on the phone and connect your systems to that signal. There is no other option.

 

[ranchhelpx]

Hello everyone. I am in the strange position of wanting to switch away from my home internet, and start using the 4G LTE connection on my phone in it's place. The reason for this is simple. It's simply faster than any available home internet in my area, and as a bonus would be cheaper as well.

A router that has OpenWRT or can load it. Search 'OpenWRT USB Tethering'
Or DD-WRT, search for 'DD-WRT USB Tethering'.

OpenWRT does a better job handling tethering out of the box.
DD-WRT does a better job handling routers with (closed-source) Broadcom chipsets.

Both have wiki articles.