On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:31 PM, Chuck Mariotti <cmario...@xunity.com> wrote: > I have the option of staying/working from a home on a the Lake for a number > of weeks this summer here in Ontario/Canada. Nice and relaxed. Unfortunately, > the only internet access is dialup, which is not acceptable (of course). > > After much poking around, I borrowed my wife's iPhone, went up to the highest > point in the house, stuck it up against each window, and low and behold with > one of those windows... one bar of 3G. 3G / Edge jumped In and Out, but it > was definitely there. Some tests were pretty good... 2mbit down, 500kup... > others, pretty bad... very bad... 3G signal would go down, etc... but it's > there!
Hey Chuck, I've got an HTC TyTn II. I think you told me that you had the same one, or a similar one. It has a connector for 2 external antennae. One is for GPS, I think the other is for cellular. The external antenna may also solve the all-or-nothing issue with your 3g phone by giving you a bit of a boost. There is a registry hack to make the device support WiFi tethering. In this case, you would be turning the phone into a WiFi AP and you could just connect to the phone using pfSense and any supported wireless card, including your Alix. Bridging 3g to WiFi with a commodity phone simplifies that part of the equation. Make sure to turn off the Bluetooth radio as it seems to interfere with reception. (this may also help on the Iphone) I know a TyTn isn't exactly cheap but if you don't have one already, you might be able to get one cheap with a screen defect or something. It's also quite possible that other, older/cheaper models would serve as well but I can only speak for what I've got. You could also jail break the Iphone and tether to it. Signal strength is an issue as you pointed out. I haven't seen an external antenna connector on the Iphone. I don't know how your wife would feel about you putting her Iphone in a tupperware container and hoisting it up a pole just so you could have Internet access. :-) If you were doing wireless tethering, you wouldn't strictly need pfSense in this arrangement. One benefit to using it would be tunneling, with OpenVPN or IPsec, back to work/home. If you turn on compression you could boost your effective throughput with some types of traffic and possibly reduce your cellular data usage. Good luck, --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: support-unsubscr...@pfsense.com For additional commands, e-mail: support-h...@pfsense.com Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
