Wireless solution for dial-up connection

You're going to need either a router with a builtin analog modem, or one with a serial port that you can connect an external modem to. I believe the USR8000-A can do the latter. I think some of the 3com officeconnect range may do the former. You will then also need to buy a wireless AP, and connect that to your router. .

Finding a router that has both wireless AND analog modem capability is likely to be hard and expensive (solwise possibly).

As an alternative, why not put a network card in the old desktop, and plug a wireless AP into it? You'd have to leave the old PC on, but you would effectively be using it as the router & modem part of the above.

Mark McIntyre

If the desktop has a network adapter and is running Windows 98 Ssecond Edition or later, you can just set up Internet Connection Sharing on it and plug its network card into one of the ports on a wireless router. If the operating system is older than that, I'd probably consider popping for a router like the AlwaysOn WiFlyer that has a built-in modem rather than hassle with trying to set up the desktop as a proxy server. It can be done, but as someone who's done it I can say that I don't think it's worth the aggravation. If a modem-equipped router as cheap as the WiFlyer had been around when I did this, I'm not sure I would have bothered.

I went down this path, sharing my 54k dial up with 2 desktop PCs and a laptop.

You can set it up as suggested above, but it means you have to run the host PC when sharing....a bit of a pain.

The way I do it was suggested in previous postings on this subject.

Basically you will have to buy a secondhand 54K LAN modem and hang a wireless access point off that. Both are left running as required.

My setup is a secondhand 3COM888 LAN modem router ($30 Aus off Ebay) with a Belkin 54G wireles router hanging off it as the access point (about $40 AUS).

Only the router in the 3COM is used.

The 3COM is actually a pretty handy unit, NAT etc.

Running this setup works great. There is no loss of (sic) speed with the dialup.

You can also have auto or manual connect. I use manual.

The 3COM886 and 888 both will do the job. The 888 is a dual modem unit, but works OK in single line setup. Neither are still in production.

The beauty of the above setup is that you can also run WPA-PSK security across your WIFI network, which you can't do with the Wiflier (WEP only).

I hope this helps.

Cheers

Rob

Great. Thanks for all solutions here. The PC isn't so well, hence the need for a new PC. Think Rob's option will have to be the one.

Good info all round, thanks again