Question Wireless to Wireless router ?

[cve60069]

Hello

I am living in a caravan and am using my PC (this PC) by using my phone with wireless tethering. All good. But I have two other PCs that do not have wireless connections. Before I buy wireless cards for these two PCs, is there a router that will pick up the wireless from my phone and allow me to connect to the PCs using Cat5 cables ?

Regards Dan

 

[bill001g]

Officially no but there are solutions. Because wifi security is designed to use the mac address as part of the encryption keys only 1 device can use a wifi connection.

So the common solution is what is called a repeater. This is normally sold as wifi in and then a second wifi signal out to extend the range. Many of these devices do have ethernet ports.

The large problem is to make this work and get past the wifi mac address restriction you need a feature called WDS. Since WDS is used to circumvent part of the wifi security it might not be available on all hotspot/routers. Some you must manually turn it on. This would cause a issue if you were to try to connect to a router/hotspot that you did not control.

Also cell phone hotspot have very strange retriction on the number of device they will allow to share. Not sure if this is a technical limitation or if it is a way for the cell company to try to get more money.

A second solution that I know exists on tplink brand routers and maybe some other brands is called universal repeater. This uses a function similar to NAT but at a mac layer. It can cause issues with some kind of filesharing but likely will not affect you.

I know most actual tplink routers have this feature and have 4 lan ports. I have seen advertising on the so called "repeater" boxes that also say "universal". I would read the manual on setting it up before you buy to be sure there is a setting talking about WDS and universal mode just to be sure it is not marketing talk. Note many of the actual repeater boxes only have a single ethernet prot, you could add a small switch. You will have to investigate is a router is better option or a box marketed as a repeater. I think all tplink routers can now run in repeater mode but again read the online manuals before you buy and see if it talks about repeater mode.