Portable Wi-Fi Hotspots

Dekortage writes "David Pogue reviews several portable wi-fi access points in the New York Times. If you have cellular Internet access, you can plug the PC card into the wi-fi box and presto, you've got Wi-Fi from wherever you are." From the article: "The card provides the Internet connection, courtesy of those companies' 3G ("third generation") high-speed cellular data networks. The box just rebroadcasts that connection as a Wi-Fi signal so that all nearby computers -- not just one privileged laptop -- can go online. With those PC cards, you can go online anywhere there's a cellular signal: in a taxi, on a bus, in a waiting room or wherever. In major cities, the speed is delightful, like a D.S.L. or slowish cable modem (400 to 700 kilobits a second)."

Mobile Wardriving

[drewzhrodague]

Now you can wardrive [wifimaps.com] AND provide internet access at the same time. I wonder if you can broadcast a better signal than people's own APs, and redirect them to your own loacal propaganda. I think I have a summer project now...

Internet Connection Sharing...

[FuryG3]

Is easy to do under Linux or Windows, so you can already do this without any fancy hardware.

1) Plug in WAP wherever you are
2) Enable ICS or iptables on whatever computer has both the mobile internet card and a wifi card
3) Configure IPs to use the computer in step 2 as gateway
4) Profit! er, I mean: Surf!

We did this on the way up to defcon between 3 cars like 4 or 5 years ago... :)

Worked for us at Linuxworld 2005

[mattbee]

We exhibited at the UK Linuxworld 2005 and because previous shows wanted like £300 for a 64Kb internet connection to the stand, it turned out to be cheaper for us to commit to paying that much over 1 year for an unlimited 3G/UMTS plan and PCMCIA card. We attached a wi-fi & 3G cards to a laptop, some software written in the car, and it turns out our portable hot-spot was providing 200-300Kb of internet access for several stands in the room that had found our AP. I like the principle but when the ridiculous per-MB usage charges kick in for 3G access it might not be so smart :-)

Verizon does some kind of checking...

[mcrbids]

I tried to do this once with my Laptop and the Verizon "Air Card". As soon as I turned on NAT, the aircard went dead. I suspect that they're using some sort of NAT detection on their end to keep this "roaming hot spot" thing from happening on their "unlimited" plans.

Just to be sure, I tried the same thing with a different connection (eg: Ethernet) and my setup worked fine - it was definitely something to do with Verizon....