Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 17:45 Post subject: Use Iphone 5 as Permanent WAN?
Hi,
I work from home and rely on the internet on a daily basis. Unfortunately I am about to move house and am unable to get broadband installed for at least 4-6 months so I am looking for an alternative.
I have recently purchased an iPhone 5 contract with unlimited 3g internet tethering and this is great for connecting to a single PC which I plan to do.
However I have other devices on my network which are connected via my router and they don't have wifi so they have to stay as a cable connection to a router.
Ideally I am looking at trying to create the following setup
iPhone 5 3G internet as primary internet sauce
Connected to a router to feed my network
Router then feeds my cabled and wifi network the internet from my iPhone.
I have been hunting around for a couple of days for ways to do this and keep coming back to DD-WRT so thought I would raise this post as it seems to be where I keep ending up on my searches so I'm hoping I'm in the right place.
I'm thinking of getting the following router "Netgear WNR1000" flashing it with the DD-WRT firmware and hoping I can create the above mentioned network structure.
I chose this router because of it's price and it is on the supported list of devices on the DD-WRT database list.
I have watched lots of videos on DD-WRT firmware but none of them specifically say, what I am trying to achieve will work so I guess my questions are.
1. Is my planned setup even possible?
and if so
2. Is it fairly straight forward to setup? I have experience with routers but not with DD-WRT but from the videos I have seen I am assuming I would bridge my Iphone connection in DD-WRT setup and treat it as the WAN connection?
I am from the UK and my phone network is "Three" as they give me the best 3G speed in my area.
If anyone can help it would be much appreciated. I'm also open to other types of router recommendations but I am on a budget of around £50 max price and I have chosen the router above because I can pick one up cheap for my first tests just in case I brick my router I don't want to try this on an expensive router just yet.
Same dilem
The solution i found was to jailbreak my iphone4 and install PDANET via cydia
Then you activate the hotspot on pdanet and it share your 3G connection over wifi directly turning your iphone into a wifi AP, then you can connect your other device directly to the iphone or use a dd-wrt router as a bridge i guess.
PDANET is available for jailbreak iphone and Android
It's fr5ee for 30 days i thibk but after that you have to pay a onetime fee and you get acces to the new version every time with the same serial number.
So if your goal was to share the 3G connection for 2 month under 50$ with pdanet registered you got it for half that if you dont need a lot of range for wifi.
My Solution in the end is as follows due to not being able to find the exact model number and version to match some of the supported routers I didn't want to risk bricking a router so the solution below does not require DD-WRT but works very nicely out of the box so doesn't void any warranty either.
My setup is as follows
Iphone 5 with 3G internet as a hotspot which connects to this via wifi
Job done I now have a home network with Ethernet and wifi capabilities and my internet being provided from my Iphone
I hope this helps anyone else who is looking to achieve this kind of setup. I think DD-WRT would have eliminated the need for the first Item and just allowed me to connected directly to the router but trying to find the routers in the UK is pretty hard or I'm looking in the wrong place.