buddy system

can friends connect through one laptop from several laptops? For
instance; cost for wi-fi access is $5 an hour, can five people go
through one laptop and share the cost?

As far as having concurrent access to an access point, probably not.
Hotspots are designed to prevent this.

While I haven't done this myself, it is probably possible to configure
ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) in Microsoft Windows so that other
laptops can connect. You'll have to connect to an access point through
a separate laptop network connection. Your laptop then behaves like a
router and issues IP addresses via dhcp (I believe). Others that are
more familiar with ICS will probably add more.

Here's are a couple of ideas to experiment with - no laptop involved
but it accomplishes the same. Connect to the hotspot using a bridge
like the Linksys WET-11, then unplug the WET11 from the PC and plug it
into the WAN port on an access point. You may be able to just plug the
WET11 into the WAN port and then connect to the hotspot. The WET11
connection setup can be tricky.

cjtwantstoknow

Donald Duquet wrote:

> can friends connect through one laptop from several laptops? For
> instance; cost for wi-fi access is $5 an hour, can five people go
> through one laptop and share the cost?
Why sure enough. Setup a gateway app, add a second wireless card and
schwach! It may take a bit O hackin but you should be able to get it to
work Only downside is that whoever has the two wireless cards will need
to be the gateway. So it would look like this,

INTERNET---ROUTER-----SWITCH----AP::::::Your laptop via
WlessNic1 192.168.1.whatever 255.255.255.whatever
==============
GATEWAY APP
==============
wlessnic2
172.16.0.1
255.255.255.0
Buddy1 172.16.0.2 255.255.255.0
Buddy2 172.16.0.3 255.255.255.0
Buddy3 172.16.0.4 255.255.255.0

---- NOTE I do not condone using this to pirate dollars but do agree
that the splitting of cost is cool.
jwk