Sharing an Aircard over a home LAN????

[Texun]

How do I take a Sprint air card and share the connection with my 4 computers via my WRT54G with DD-WRT?

Sprint and Verizon are my options and I think I have a choice between a card bus or USB connection. That takes care of one computer but am I SOL on the others?

Is this what ICS is for or do I have a better option?

Two machines are on XP and the other two are on Vista Home Premium.

Thanks!

 

[kevnich2]

Get a mobile broadband router but be warned, you only have a 5gb cap on those cards now, very easy to go over.

 

[Texun]

I might be able to get by on 5 gigs a month if I turn of MS updates.

I know a mobile router is an option but I was hoping for something cheaper. Last time I checked those things were $199. Other than convert one of the computers in to a router I don't see one, and I have no idea which Linux distro handles air cards.

 

[wlee]

You *USED* to be able to use ICS. We had a laptop setup with a Sprint AirCard and ICS so the office could have INET untill the T1 was installened. It was under the old "unlimited" biz contract. They must have flagged us for high activity. Sprint remotely "updated" the AirCard software/firmware and killed the ICS. Whenever it detected any other interface active, it would disco the Sprint connection. If you pulled the ethernet cable, it would re-connect fine. We had to buy a Cradlepoint MBR1000 to get around the prob. Which, BTW, worked quite well. We ended up using 1 Sprint Card and 2 Verizon cards. It load balanced quite well. Cell traffic can be quite heavy on the weekdays ( Midtown NYC )

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: wlee
You *USED* to be able to use ICS. We had a laptop setup with a Sprint AirCard and ICS so the office could have INET untill the T1 was installened. It was under the old "unlimited" biz contract. They must have flagged us for high activity. Sprint remotely "updated" the AirCard software/firmware and killed the ICS. Whenever it detected any other interface active, it would disco the Sprint connection. If you pulled the ethernet cable, it would re-connect fine. We had to buy a Cradlepoint MBR1000 to get around the prob. Which, BTW, worked quite well. We ended up using 1 Sprint Card and 2 Verizon cards. It load balanced quite well. Cell traffic can be quite heavy on the weekdays ( Midtown NYC )

I appreciate the link. It figures.... someone would screw up a good thing. I don't see why they would disable ICS if they added a usage cap but I guess they have their reasons.

 

[holden j caufield]

we had a temp trailer setup with a sprint card.

on xp we bridged the sprint card with the laptop NIC, then ran a cat5 cable from the laptop nic to the dd-wrt router. Worked good for a temp solution. Pretty fast too.

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: holden j caufield
we had a temp trailer setup with a sprint card.

on xp we bridged the sprint card with the laptop NIC, then ran a cat5 cable from the laptop nic to the dd-wrt router. Worked good for a temp solution. Pretty fast too.

Sounds like a good "MacGyver" fix to me. Thanks!