Can I use dial-up modem with wireless router??? HELP NEEDED

[Bill]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

If I get a wireless card for the laptop, can I use the router for
connection to the internet for both the pc and laptop?

What's the best way to accomplish dual connectivity in my setup??

Bill

 

[kony]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

If I get a wireless card for the laptop, can I use the router for
connection to the internet for both the pc and laptop?

What's the best way to accomplish dual connectivity in my setup??

Depends on how you define "best".

In some people's minds, best would be getting broadband, not
dialup, a broadband modem and putting a router behind it-
wifi supportive for the laptop since laptop users benefit so
much from it.

As for dialup, if you both MUST use dialup, get the wifi
router (one that can function as an access point and has a
switch built in, OR just get an actual access point and a
hub or switch) to give the notebook the wifi access to the
lan. Then your system must be left on and is the gateway,
using windows ICS you share your internet connection.

The other alternative is a router that accepts serial
connections and supports an external dialup (analog) modem.
I dont' know of any, there were a couple older models but
they dont' have wifi integral so you'd still need a wifi
access point too.

Another option would be to simply add a wifi card to your pc
and set it as the gateway using ICS to share the connection.
Any scheme that uses your PC as a gateway is seemingly less
desirable because it means your PC has to be on for her
laptop to connect, and is less secure being directly
connected to the 'net itself instead of behind a router.
This latter situation will always remain unless you find a
router that accepts an external modem and buy the external
modem too.

 

[Bill]

Depends on how you define "best".

In some people's minds, best would be getting broadband, not
dialup, a broadband modem and putting a router behind it-
wifi supportive for the laptop since laptop users benefit so
much from it.

As for dialup, if you both MUST use dialup, get the wifi
router (one that can function as an access point and has a
switch built in, OR just get an actual access point and a
hub or switch) to give the notebook the wifi access to the
lan. Then your system must be left on and is the gateway,
using windows ICS you share your internet connection.

The other alternative is a router that accepts serial
connections and supports an external dialup (analog) modem.
I dont' know of any, there were a couple older models but
they dont' have wifi integral so you'd still need a wifi
access point too.

Another option would be to simply add a wifi card to your pc
and set it as the gateway using ICS to share the connection.
Any scheme that uses your PC as a gateway is seemingly less
desirable because it means your PC has to be on for her
laptop to connect, and is less secure being directly
connected to the 'net itself instead of behind a router.
This latter situation will always remain unless you find a
router that accepts an external modem and buy the external
modem too.

Thanks for the clarification.

 

[Robert BL]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

If I get a wireless card for the laptop, can I use the router for
connection to the internet for both the pc and laptop?

What's the best way to accomplish dual connectivity in my setup??

Bill

Here's a product that can do what you need. Not cheap though.

http://www.wiflyer.com/StoreFront.bok

 

[Obie San San]

Thanks for the clarification.

He didn't really clarify anything. I am surpised you don't have a ton of
more questions based on Kony's answer.

Anyway, I did this once with two pc's to see if it would work. One of them
never went higher than 14k when both were sharing the dial up. Do you have
any idea how slow 14k is? I tell you what. Go to www.abc.com and watch how
slow the page lows on 50k. Now assume that both pc and laptop can connect at
25k (almost impossible by the way). I bet neither one of you are going to
want to be on the internet at the same time. I bet you will even have to go
in and change some settings in your internet browser to turn of time-outs
and lower them for nondisplaying pages.

But now to get back to your question, because I know you are serious about
trying this at least one. Get a linksys router for the pc, and follow the
setup instructions perfectly that come with it. I suggest linksys because
their online support is better than dlink and there diagrams are easier to
understand. They also have an online setup tool you can download and run on
your computer that will make changes in settings for you that will probably
be necessary to get connected.

Once you can connect the to the internet with the pc actually connected to
the router, then and only then should you set up the wireless adapter in the
notebook like you said you were. There is no need fooling with the wireless
card and notebook if you can't get the router working with internet on your
pc.

Connect to the internet on the pc, and then set up the network on the
notebook by using Windows network setup. Windows makes all this easy, but
you are still going to have a learning curve. I never had any success with
the wireless route. What I had to do was to use the rj45 ports on the router
and notebook to run a network cable from the router to the laptop to get the
internet to share.

 

[Michael C]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

If I get a wireless card for the laptop, can I use the router for
connection to the internet for both the pc and laptop?

What's the best way to accomplish dual connectivity in my setup??

Bill

Hi Bill,

You don't have a lot of good options really but it is possible. This is what
I would do (well, actually I'd just get broadband but..)
1) Find a second hand *external* 56k modem. These must be like $1.50 these
days.
2) Get yourself a router that will work with an external 56k modem. I have a
DLink DI804V here that does it quite well. You might need to look second
hand for this but these should be cheap.
3) Get yourself a wireless access point either new or second hand.
4) Get a wireless access card for the laptop.
5) Install a $4 network card into your PC to connect to the router.

This setup will work reasonably well (for dialup) and be quite reliable. If
you live in aus I could sell you the router but I'm guessing you're US.

Michael

 

[Paul]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

If I get a wireless card for the laptop, can I use the router for
connection to the internet for both the pc and laptop?

What's the best way to accomplish dual connectivity in my setup??

Bill

Cheap one (if you can find it)
http://www.bestdata.com/index.php?file=c-allproddesc&iProductId=16156

It is reviewed here
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000ESUEY/002-2117886-1728853?v=glance&n=172282

Another one.
http://www.actiontec.com/products/broadband/dual_pcmodem/features.php

Expensive one. Auto-failover from broadband to dialup is more
functionality than you described.
http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProduct&localeCode=EN_USA&cid=1&scid=17&pid=858

The top two have two Ethernet ports. You could connect one
of the Ethernet ports to a wireless device, to get to the
laptop.

After experiencing dialup while travelling at Christmas, I don't
think I could stand to be without ADSL or a cable modem. I was
trying to do Windows Update over dialup, and that is more pain
than I could stand. The only thing practical about dialup, might
be doing email. Web surfing would be pretty slow, even with only
one person sharing the modem. And imagine the granularity problem
when you are both using it - it takes time to send a packet, and
the second computer will have a long wait to send its packet.

Paul

 

[GT]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

If I get a wireless card for the laptop, can I use the router for
connection to the internet for both the pc and laptop?

What's the best way to accomplish dual connectivity in my setup??

If you want nothing more than to share your connection, then just buy a
wireless card for your main PC and link the 2 PCs together directly. No need
for a router, or hub, or switch. To get windows to make the internet
connection from one PC available to the other, then enable "connection
sharing" (google for more info).

This is possibly not the 'best' solution, but it is the cheapest and
possibly easiest. It all depends on what you mean by best - cheapest,
fastest, most future-proof etc ... ??

 

[Chris Hill]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

No, that wouldn't really help you. Buy yourself a usb wireless
adapter; set both up in ad-hoc mode rather than infrastructure.
Enable internet connection sharing on the desktop to share to the
wireless adapter and you're done.

 

[kony]

He didn't really clarify anything. I am surpised you don't have a ton of
more questions based on Kony's answer.

Well you seem to be overlooking the things I"d mentioned,
and that what you describe below will not work without more
parts and functionality added. I'll elaborate below.

Anyway, I did this once with two pc's to see if it would work. One of them
never went higher than 14k when both were sharing the dial up.

What do you mean?
"Sharing" by ICS would not be any lower dialup speed, the
host system still has 100% speed and only the bandwidth is
shared, only an issue on concurrent downloading.

If you mean installing a second phone line and a digital
splitter for it (to use same pair of twisted copper) then
indeed, that may easily force the connection speed to drop
down to 28K.

Do you have
any idea how slow 14k is? I tell you what. Go to www.abc.com and watch how
slow the page lows on 50k. Now assume that both pc and laptop can connect at
25k (almost impossible by the way).

I have no idea what you think you mean, but in any (every)
scenario, 28K is in fact possible and expected.

I bet neither one of you are going to
want to be on the internet at the same time. I bet you will even have to go
in and change some settings in your internet browser to turn of time-outs
and lower them for nondisplaying pages.

With a very slow connection, yes that is possible... but
would one really want to surf 'site that load so slowly that
they need time-outs changed? Doubtful if it can be avoided,
better to just disable features that hog bandwidth like
animated images, shockwave flash, video and sound.

But now to get back to your question, because I know you are serious about
trying this at least one. Get a linksys router for the pc, and follow the
setup instructions perfectly that come with it.

Having it alone, is only of use to connect a wifi laptop.
Dialup analog (not ADSL) will require a modem still, and
they use serial connections almost always so the router must
support this. If the router doesn't, it is not routing, can
only function as an access point- which is fine, a valid use
to gain wifi ability on the lan, but it won't get him
connected to the internet by itself.

I suggest linksys because
their online support is better than dlink and there diagrams are easier to
understand. They also have an online setup tool you can download and run on
your computer that will make changes in settings for you that will probably
be necessary to get connected.

UGH!
There's no need for software to get a router working.
The router interface is HTTP via web brower and if the
router's routing functionality is needed to point to a
gateway's parameters, it's passed via DHCP from the host
wan.

Once you can connect the to the internet with the pc actually connected to
the router,

How does he do that? You're overlooking the only
significant detail, that to connect, it's not going through
that router you suggested because it doesn't support analog
modems.

...then and only then should you set up the wireless adapter in the
notebook like you said you were. There is no need fooling with the wireless
card and notebook if you can't get the router working with internet on your
pc.

Do not try to "get the router working" because it is
physically impossible to route incoming traffic when there
is no incoming traffic, becaue there is no way to connect
the modem to it.

On the other hand, IF he got a 3rd party software and set up
his machine to be a DHCP server, he could (theoretically)
hook his system up to the WAN port on a router instead, but
this is a very unusual setup and segregates his system...
practically nobody sets it up that way as it is of limited
benefit even if possible.

Connect to the internet on the pc, and then set up the network on the
notebook by using Windows network setup. Windows makes all this easy, but
you are still going to have a learning curve. I never had any success with
the wireless route. What I had to do was to use the rj45 ports on the router
and notebook to run a network cable from the router to the laptop to get the
internet to share.

???

There's nothing fundamentally hard about getting wireless to
work, you might check a few networking tutorials found via
Google search.

 

[Obie San San]

I tried this without a router. I still have the 75 foot crossover cable in
fact. I had no trouble getting the computers to connect to share files over
the network, but I never was able to get them to share the dial up
connection.

I feel so sorry for this guy. Odds are he is not going to get this to work
even slowly.

 

[kony]

I tried this without a router. I still have the 75 foot crossover cable in
fact. I had no trouble getting the computers to connect to share files over
the network, but I never was able to get them to share the dial up
connection.

I feel so sorry for this guy. Odds are he is not going to get this to work
even slowly.

With the right equipment it can work fine (for what it is,
which is still dial-up).

For example I have set up 3COM 56K analog modem -to- Dlink
DI-704 router (w/serial connection abilities), to LAN.
Worked fine at about 48K as it had before the router was
added, connection from a single system as was typical.

There is nothing hard about it, tricky, left to chance, etc
and so forth, you merely need the equipment or software (for
windows' connection sharing) to do it.

Another option would be something like a Freesco box, it
runs a minimalized Linux-on-floppy with a nic and (dialup
analog) modem in it. Needs approx 486 system with 12MB
memory or newer for best results.

 

[Michael C]

I feel so sorry for this guy. Odds are he is not going to get this to work
even slowly.

I suspect he gave up after reading Kony's post.

Michael

 

[DaveW]

It will not work. You need broadband to connect via a router.

 

[Conor]

New to this. I have a pc with a 56k internal modem. Just bought my
wife a dell laptop (it has a modem also). Now we both want to be
online at the same time. We know it will be slow access. I can get a
Linksys WRT54G wireless modem for under $20 with rebates.

If I get a wireless card for the laptop, can I use the router for
connection to the internet for both the pc and laptop?

Yes.

 

[Michael C]

It will not work. You need broadband to connect via a router.

Wrong.

Michael

 

[Don Thornton II]

Out in the boonies beyond DSL range, where the only 'Net options are
slow dial-up or expensive satellite, I got my parents hooked up wired
and wirelessly to a single shared dial-up connection.

It's possible to have a Windows desktop use ICS to share the dial-up,
but if the desktop is also sharing things like printers and directories,
it will be difficult at best to share both the connection and the
resources. I couldn't figure out how to share both dial-up and printers
by ICS on a router, even when the sharing PC uses XP SP2.

What I did was take a spare P2-400, stuck a modem and NIC in it, and put
Linux on it. Something Debian-based is the most hassle-free, especially
with older hardware. In my case, I used Libranet 2.7 Classic. Once
installed, I configured the modem to dial and hang up from two user
commands (pon and poff, part of the ppp package), then I set up what
Linux calls IP masquerading to turn it into a bridge/router.

The LAN interface, eth0, was set to a static IP address. I chose
192.168.1.2 to avoid conflict with the wireless router's DHCP settings.
After that, I plugged the P2 into the router's WAN/Internet port. I
logged into the router and configured the WAN settings to use a static
IP and static route, directing all 'Net-bound traffic through the P2.

On each of the computers behind the router, I put a telnet scripting
tool on them, wrote scripts to telnet into the P2 and dial, hang up, and
get the status of the dial-up connection, and made desktop shortcuts
pointing to those scripts.

The result is that, with all the home desktops and laptops connecting
through the LAN, files and printers are shared seamlessly at the same
time they're all on the 'Net, and with reasonable security at that.

Sharing a dial-up connection doen't make things much slower, not even
when one of the computers is downloading or uploading huge files, but
this kind of dedicated router set-up makes using a shared connection as
easy as opening an icon.

 

[Obie San San]

<"I couldn't figure out how to share both dial-up and printers
by ICS on a router, even when the sharing PC uses XP SP2.">

Use a usb wireless adapter and a wireless router with rj45 ports on the
back. The wirless network would allow the internet. Then run a crossover
cable from PC1 to PC2 and enable file and print sharing on the network. Much
less complicated and fool proof than the other way you were doing.



<"Sharing a dial-up connection doen't make things much slower, not even
when one of the computers is downloading or uploading huge files, but
this kind of dedicated router set-up makes using a shared connection as
easy as opening an icon.">

Doesn't make things slower? Are you kidding me?

 

[Don Thornton II]

[snip]

<"Sharing a dial-up connection doen't make things much slower, not even
[snip]

Doesn't make things slower? Are you kidding me?

Doesn't make things *much* slower. Of course dial-up is slow to begin
with, and multiple downloads will slow things down further, regardless
of whether it's on one computer or spread out over more than one. It's
not like we're trying to download CDs or watch movies on dial-up...

The crossover cable idea you suggest actually worked very well when I
had to use it about three years ago, but it doesn't scale up beyond two
computers. Not very useful for an online family of five.

XP's ICS works well enough for sharing a broadband connection, but it's
iffy at best for sharing dial-up. I stumped Microsoft, Google, Ask,
AllTheWeb, and a few other search engines and fora with why ICS on
dial-up doesn't work as advertised.

 

[Michael C]

On each of the computers behind the router, I put a telnet scripting tool
on them, wrote scripts to telnet into the P2 and dial, hang up, and get
the status of the dial-up connection, and made desktop shortcuts pointing
to those scripts.

Sounds complicated compared to buying a $20 router that does dialup ;-) It
will also cost more in the long run with a p2-400 running all the time.

Michael