Increase the potential of your Mobile Broadband by adding a Wireless Router

If you have a wireless router then you can connect multiple devices to your Mobile Broadband connection. This applies to any Wi-Fi enabled device, which in my home includes Laptop, Mobile Phone, Nintendo DS, and a Nintendo Wii. There are a two main ways of doing this, either you can get a Wireless Router which has Mobile Broadband built-in, or that you can connect your Mobile Broadband device to. Or, you can set-up a home network and allow other devices on the network to connect through your computer which has the device attached.

I know Vodafone has had a wireless router with included Mobile Broadband for a few years now but it has always been very expensive and only available to business users. For the Consumer market I have heard that T-Mobile and Three both have plans to release these but will most likely be locked to their own networks.

For those wanting to try a standard wireless router, here are some links to guides to get these working.

For Windows users I recommend this guide from Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306126

For Linux users I recommend this detailed HOWTO:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/IP-Masquerade-HOWTO/index.html

or this shorter HOWTO:

http://www.howtoforge.com/internet-connection-sharing-masquerading-on-linux

And for Mac users, this guide from Apple:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8156.html

For those of you who do not have a Wireless Router at the moment, they can be purchased online at the following places among others:

The Carphone Warehouse
Euroffice
ASDA

Mobile Broadband Alliance

The big news for Mobile Broadband at the moment seems to be the decision by a group of 16 companies to form the Mobile Broadband Alliance (or Mobile Broadband Initiative, reports differ) and put one billion dollars in to promoting this. Which is going to include a brand new Mobile Broadband sticker to be stuck on new computers. The first of these are to be rolled out in time for christmas apparently. But for those of you who don't want to wait until christmas, you can get a Laptop with Mobile Broadband built-in with Orange now, unfortunately it will not include that new sticker.