Wireless connection via a router

[yajrab]

So I have a conundrum with the internet I have, the place I have has no decent internet available from retailers such as BT, Virgin media, Plusnet etc. My apartment however does have supplied internet however you have to pay for the amount of devices connected to it and also it has network discovery off on the routers (since it is a public internet and acts kind of like a guest network for BTwifi-with-fon if you know what I mean where you pay a certain amount and you log in to someone elses router). I want to get decent speeds however with my own plan it is not possible but I want the luxury of my own private network so I can use my google chromecast etc and share between different devices on my network so it needs to have network discovery on for the chromecast to work. Is there such a device that I can connect to all my devices such as a router/wireless switch but can almost piggy back an internet connection off of another router that I will pay for?

In short, I want a device that can connect to a wireless access point to get me an internet connection however it acts as a router in itself to give me my own private LAN so I can discover the devices I own such as my google chromecast, computer, Xbox, TV and mobile phone etc.?

The only information it needs to connect to this network is a MAC address I can assign the router to provide internet to and the device having a wireless card/wireless capabilities.

 

[BFG-9000]

The simplest solution is two devices: a "wireless bridge" to connect to their router, wired to your own router to distribute this to all of your devices. The disadvantage of this is it's double-NAT, and IPv6 tends to not work in such a setup because their router can only see the IPv6 address of the bridge itself.

If you don't need much speed, some phones can even work as a hotspot when connected via USB to a PC which is itself connected to their router via Wifi.

Note that the terminology is really confusing because technically a "bridge" connects the networks so that the main router hands out all DHCP addresses, in which case they will see how many devices you have. If you are repurposing an old router for this purpose, the correct setting is usually some sort of wireless client mode.

 

[yajrab]

The simplest solution is two devices: a "wireless bridge" to connect to their router, wired to your own router to distribute this to all of your devices. The disadvantage of this is it's double-NAT, and IPv6 tends to not work in such a setup because their router can only see the IPv6 address of the bridge itself.

If you don't need much speed, some phones can even work as a hotspot when connected via USB to a PC which is itself connected to their router via Wifi.

Note that the terminology is really confusing because technically a "bridge" connects the networks so that the main router hands out all DHCP addresses, in which case they will see how many devices you have. If you are repurposing an old router for this purpose, the correct setting is usually some sort of wireless client mode.

Thank you for the reply, as long as the device can connect to the router as a client it should work. I think I have tried before using a mobile phone to connect to the wifi and rebroadcast the signal through a hotspot/tethering however I have found it is a bit of a faff due to the wireless hotspot keeps turning itself off so no devices connect to it automatically. I have also found that it does not work as a router in itself so I cannot use my chromecast. I was looking a little bit last night and would you know if DD-WRT Client mode would work for me? From what I could make out, it stops you using wireless connections which would be fine if I got myself an access point or something.

 

[BFG-9000]

Yep, if you have two spare routers you can use one as the "bridge" and the other as an AP. With DD-WRT, the wireless mode of the bridge should be set to client because the other three possible settings (client bridge, repeater bridge, WDS) all have addresses assigned from their gateway router just as if you had connected to it directly. Plus the last one has some strict hardware requirements.

With a phone hotspot you are supposed to use Internet Connection Sharing on the PC to act as the router, while the hotspot serves only as the AP.

The trick with DD-WRT is of course that plenty of router hardware only works well with some builds of DD-WRT while other builds can even brick things. You have to actually find reviews of the specific build working with your hardware before it's worth risking a flash! And of course the kitchen sink approach leads to lots of bundled features that don't actually work or work very well.

It's a shame that the Tomato project is about dead because that was the one most like most OEM firmware so was the most familiar and thus most intuitive for most people to use. It was the most reliable + stable, particularly on Broadcom MIPs, at least before all the multi-WAN silliness. ASUS firmware is Tomato, as is Merlin.

OpenWRT/LEDE is the other major 3rd party firmware that tends to be more stable because it works on less hardware and has only the features you install. It isn't the easiest to use but at least a curated build helps for installation, though the interface and setting names are very different.