Be your own mobile Wi-fi hotspot

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my Twitter stream or my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Take your 3G Windows Mobile phone (AT&T 8525 or Tilt, Sprint Mogul), and download WMWifRouter. When you launch it, it turns on the phone’s wi-fi and creates an access point called “WMWifiRouter”, backhaul fed by the phone’s 3G connection. This SSID is now viewable by ANY wi-fi device near it.

The practicality of this is huge:

– Stay at any hotel (where there’s 3G coverage), no more need to find one that offers pricey wi-fi or wired in-room coverage.
– Share the connection with a few devices.
– Turn your car into a hotspot. On long drives, let everyone be connected. No need to rent Avis’ Autonet product.
– Simplest connectivity ever! No need to even deal w/ pairing and setting up your tethered laptop via bluetooth. Keep bluetooth off and just use wi-fi on both devices.
– Especially great for devices that don’t have bluetooth data profiles– for iPhones today that are only EDGE, use this to 3G the iPhone’s connectivity (for supergeeks who can afford to carry 2 hi-end phones).

It runs through the phone’s battery quick, so having a power cord handy is a good idea.

  • http://lws.vox.com Lawrence Sinclair

    Very cool. It is not entirely unreasonable to buy one of these phones and use this software just for this feature if you needed to share basic Internet access with colleagues in odd locations without wifi or with expensive wifi. You could swap out the sim from another phone if this was not your primary device.

  • http://lws.vox.com Lawrence Sinclair

    Very cool. It is not entirely unreasonable to buy one of these phones and use this software just for this feature if you needed to share basic Internet access with colleagues in odd locations without wifi or with expensive wifi. You could swap out the sim from another phone if this was not your primary device.

blog comments powered by Disqus