Wifi Options

[bjarvis]

Dear Lazywebz:

My campground has a new wifi offering. One can purchase relatively speedy wifi from an outsourced provider by the hour, day, week, month, etc.. Alas, once one has purchased the wifi access, it isn't transferable between devices: if you bought it on your laptop, you can't just logout & login with your tablet or mobile phone.

Is there some novel hardware or software mechanism by which I could create an in-house (in-trailer) shared hotspot while purchasing just a single $100 per season package for one device?

Alternatively, I already pay for hotspot functionality with Verizon Wireless via my mobile phone but the signal strength in extreme rural West Virginia is so feeble that I get only "1X" data rather than 3G or 4G LTE, and even that meagre offering is only available on good weather days from the south end of the trailer deck. Does anyone have a recommendation on a repeater/amplifier which could boost the gain enough that my phone could latch onto the 3G network and thus use my Verizon hotspot instead of the camp's wifi?

Help me, Obiwan: you're my only hope!

Comments

[davidlevine]

I've never tried this, but a device such as the "Netgear Universal WiFi Range Extender" (WN2500RP, WN2000RPT, or WN3000RP) might fill the bill -- log the extender into the outsourced provider and then log your other devices into the extender. Good luck!

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's amazingly fucked up (the bilking of each individual person per device… I mean, we all have 2+ devices these days, eh?).

Do you happen to know the coverage area of non-VZN radios? Perhaps ATT/Sprint/Tmo have radios that cover the area.

The other thing I considered is to hook up a laptop that can get the wifi signal, and use wired ethernet into your own Wifi access point on the WAN port, then serve all devices through *that* hotspot. (just be sure to keep the laptop's connection active by pinging some server every couple of minutes.)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's something of an antiquated billing mechanism since so many folks have multiple devices. I suspect the provider isn't targeting especially sophisticated users or has simply chosen the lazy path to easy profits rather than working a little harder for hardcore users. I'd be willing to pay a small premium for my additional devices on top of a base primary account but that isn't on offer.

The coverage of non-Verizon wireless providers completely sucks here. We're simply so rural, the population so sparse and the terrain so hostile to RF (undulating tall hills with sharp, deep valleys), it's a telecom nightmare. Sprint voice reaches here but not data. AT&T voice is spotty and their data connectivity even more so. Verizon, sucky though it may be, is the strongest provider here.

Your idea of using a primary laptop and sharing via a secondary router occurred to me. For our next visit, I can try bringing a spare wifi router with cabling to see what I can cobble together. It would be nicer to have a standalone repeater/dhcp server appliance which could live at the trailer permanently but I'll take what I can get.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I have a Linksys WRE54G repeater handy and I'm going to play with that; at a glance, it seems similar to the models you've mentioned.

The snag is that I really need a device which is also a DHCP/NAT server: most repeaters simply listen on one wifi channel and blindly repeat onto another wifi channel. That's sufficient to extend the range of an existing network but since my source ISP isn't going to feed additional IP addresses, I'll have to spoof that at my end.

More news as it develops...