Quit the Cable Co., kept the router, have unlimited Data plan on phones, but need to share files too?

se_ant

Prominent
Sep 10, 2017
1
0
510
Hello all, thanks in advance for your help. I am knowledgable in computers and networking, butnot an IT Professional, so the answer may be obvious, but I appreciate your help.

The question: How can I share my phone's data plan, to get internet on my home network, and also be able to share a printer, and files?

The situation: I have kicked out the cable company ISP, and my wife and I rely on our 4G unlimited data plans on our phones. I have the cable modem/wifi router that we used with cable. We have a desktop PC running Windows 7, with a USB attached printer/scanner. There are 2 laptops in the house as well, both running Windows 10. I had been creating a hotspot with 1 phone and connecting, to get the laptop online, but then if I want to print, I disconnect from hotspot, and connect back to home wifi network, in order to print. I also tried running connectify on desktop to share phones USB Tethering ability, this works well for internet sharing, but connectify does not have any means for file/printer sharing.

All our hardware is mostly current and capable. Our phones are both Android.

Help please!
 
Solution
Easiest way to do this is to use your router in WiFi client/bridge mode. In that mode, it can connect to the phone's hotspot. Any devices plugged into the LAN ports on the router (like LAN printers) will act like they're connected to your phone via WiFi. The drawback of this method is that if you leave and take your phone with you or its battery dies, your networked home devices will no longer be able to communicate with each other.

A more robust way to do this is to use your router in WiFi client (not bridged) mode. In this mode, it will connect to the phone's hotspot, but it still acts like a router. It's like plugging the phone's hotspot into the WAN port. Since the router stays at home, all your devices will remain networked...

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
No, I don't think that you are missing something simple. I would recommend an ASUS RT-AC68 (well actually most ASUS routers will work) and attach your phone to the router not to the computer. While it is possible that your current router could work, you would have to determine if that is the case.

HERE is a pretty good guide to doing just that, and they also recommend ASUS routers as they have long been used to do this.
 
Easiest way to do this is to use your router in WiFi client/bridge mode. In that mode, it can connect to the phone's hotspot. Any devices plugged into the LAN ports on the router (like LAN printers) will act like they're connected to your phone via WiFi. The drawback of this method is that if you leave and take your phone with you or its battery dies, your networked home devices will no longer be able to communicate with each other.

A more robust way to do this is to use your router in WiFi client (not bridged) mode. In this mode, it will connect to the phone's hotspot, but it still acts like a router. It's like plugging the phone's hotspot into the WAN port. Since the router stays at home, all your devices will remain networked all the time. If you take your phone and leave the house, these devices lose Internet but can still communicate with each other.

The drawback is that since your router is using its WiFi radio to connect to the phone's hotspot, it cannot generate its own hotspot. You'll need another router or WiFi access point to generate a home WiFi network. (I vaguely recall DD-WRT was trying to add the capability to use a single WiFi radio to both connect as a client and generate its own hotspot at the same time, but I don't know if they got anywhere with it. It may be pretty easy to do if your router has 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios. Use one to connect to the phone, use the other to generate a new hotspot.)
 
Solution