Need help setting up home network with mobile hotspot, asus rt-n66u, and tplink switch

[jchi22101]

A little pretext, I don't have a good ISP other than my T-Mobile phone that has UNLIMITED tethering and mobile hotspot. I live in a very small town and it is never throttled. So this will not be an issue when it comes to being limited by data usage.

What I would like to do is have home internet with ethernet ports. I have an extra phone line that is using a Samsung Galaxy On5 tethered to my home computer. For Wifi, I just turn the mobile hotspot on. However, I wanted to have access to ethernet ports so I bought an ASUS rt-n66u that I am able to successfully tether my phone to. The problem here is that when I connect my desktop via ethernet cable to the router, and also connect my wifes laptop to the same router via ethernet, only 1 can do a speedtest at a time. I can go to speedtest.net on both of them and one will run the speedtest while the other waits and fails until the other one completes. I am able to get a solid 20 mb/s from my tethered connection. So something weird is going on. Its like only 1 can work at one time?

Another thing I did was buy a 16 port tplink switch because I need a lot of ethernet ports open. I was going to try to tether my phone to my desktop and then ICS my connection to the switch. Unfortunately it doesnt work, when I connect the laptop to the switch via ethernet cable, I don't get anything.

I know that I am doing something extremely wrong here so can someone please point me in the right direction?? I can definitely see this being a DNS issue or DHCP issue but I don't know where to look or what to do. I will gladly accept any help. If I need some type of DNS Server or DHCP server I have access to Server 2012 and can virtualize it and set it up , it has just been a while and I am a little rusty.

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

If this was a year ago I would have said you can not get unlimited data and especially not tethered. The vendors still make it very hard on you to use a phone to do this. The data modems and routers tend to be trivial but I have not seen any of those that have truly unlimited data.

There are not a lot of phones you can actually tether to a router so I am surprised you got it to work. I suspect the ISP has a limit on the number of unique mac addresses that can use the connection. I know many have limits like 5 devices when you are running in hotspot mode.

Your router would have to treat the tethered connection as a WAN connection and then use NAT to share the connection. The ISP can not tell you are doing that they only see the routers ip and mac. That is not to say they do not know you have it tethered to something.

ICS is mostly just your PC doing the same function as a router. It runs nat between the shared connection and pc in your house. ICS though needs a special option in the driver to allow it t be shared. Many of the tethering drivers do not have that option.....I suspect intentionally to prevent the use of ICS.

Still your problem may just be ICS not configured correctly. It is extremely picky so you need to follow microsoft instructions exactly.

 

[jchi22101]

Yea I was able to get it to tether to the USB port on my ASUS RT-N66U as a WAN and get it to work but like I said when I tether the phone straight to the router and then connect the computers to the router, I can only run a speedtest at one time. Is there any special software I can put on my computer to make it run as a router? So I could tether my phone to a USB port on my computer, and then use my ethernet port on my computer to connect it to a switch that would give me a lot of ports.

Should I leave DHCP turned on at the router? Or does my phone handle the DHCP and DNS side? I really just someone to help walk me through the IP setup part and the router setup part. I think I can get it to work if I can just wrap my head around it. I figured that the router needs to have its own ip and be pointing towards either the computer for DNS (IF im doing ICS) or I can tether it directly to the router instead of the computer. I have a lot of options but I don't know which one is best.

I have seen you post on a lot of stuff bill001g and you seem extremely knowledgeable in this field lol any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

The best way to look at this is as if the tethered connection was a direct wire to the ISP. You need to set things up the same. Your router would need to do dhcp and nat. If you use ICS it does the same functions.

I never accomplished getting a tethered phone to work. When I used a USB data dongle you just choose the option to use it as the wan and it was configured pretty much the same as any other wan connection...ie not much you leave it all alone.

When you are running tethered your phone should act as a modem and give the router a IP address on the wan port from the ISP.