Help with bridging 4G phone to home router

[Dale Preston]

I've been trying to get this to work for weeks, a few hours each week, and can't get it to work. I'd appreciate any suggestions or examples of what's working for others, even if I have to buy higher-end equipment.

I have ATT mobile with a Samsung Galaxy SGH-I727 phone (an older Galaxy with Android 2.3). I want to use it as an access point to replace my very expensive satellite Internet service. The phone works fine as an access point and I get good 4G service at home and most places I go. I'm able to connect to the phone-as-access-point using my tablet or my laptop.

What I want to do is to connect my wired devices through my router to my phone instead of my satellite modem.

I have a TP-Link WR841N router now connected to my satellite modem. It is configured correctly for my current setup and everything works - my wireless devices connect and my wired as well. I have two wired PCs on it and through ICS on one PC I also have remote access to my video surveillance system that is on its own network.

In keeping with the policy on IP addresses, even though these are my internal IP addresses only, these numbers don't reflect reality but model reality. Here's what I tried without success.

Phone/Access-Point serving DHCP and Default Gateway of 192.168.xx.yy ---> TP-Link TL-WR702N Wireless as Bridge ---> TP-Link WR702N LAN port IP address from phone DHCP ---> WAN Port on TP-Link TL-WR841N Router with IP address from phone DHCP ---> LAN port on TL-WR841N router with configured IP address of 192.168.0.1 serving DHCP from 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.199 ---> My PC at 192.168.0.101 getting DHCP from TL-WR841N.

My PC should be able to access the Internet but it cannot. I know the 841 is talking to the phone because it gets an IP address but when I try to go to the Internet I get "destination unreachable" from the WAN site of the 841.

If I connect a wireless device directly to the phone's AP then I get Internet just fine. If I go directly through the bridge (the 702N) I cannot get to the Internet. This applies to the 841 router or my tablet. Through the bridge, nothing, even though I can get an IP address from the phone. Directly to the phone, getting the same IP address, it works fine.

If anyone is bridging their ATT phone or access point to their home router, I'd love to hear what equipment they're using and what settings. Even better, though, would be if anyone sees anything I am doing wrong so I can make it work without new equipment.

Thanks

 

[bill001g]

Although I didn't figure out your whole post it seems if you try to connect with a bridge it does not work but it does with a pc directly.

What I have seen on a lot of the hotspot clients on phones is they do not support WDS. This is the feature that allow multiple mac addresses to be carried over a single bridge connection. To bridge multiple mac addresses to a non WDS device it must run as a router using NAT to hide all the other mac/ip addresses.

Even if it does support WDS it may require you to put the mac of the bridge device in to allow it to connect.

 

[Dale Preston]

Thanks. Sorry the post was long but all the instructions on the site ask for as much detail as possible - even more than I gave.

It could be the MAC address issue you mentioned. Next time I get to work on it I'll set the router to do NAT. That's the only thing I can figure at this point or that the connection between the bridge and the phone is unreliable.