Allowing your computer to connect through your phone to the Internet via USB or Bluetooth is something that has been around for ages. Most phones also allow connections to wireless access points. But what about, instead of using USB or Bluetooth as a bridge to your phone’s Internet connection, you could connect to the phone through your wireless card?
WMWifiRouter (wmwifirouter.com) is an awesome utility that you can install on a Windows Mobile powered phone that turns the phone into a broadband wireless access point. Rather than just having one computer tethered to the Internet through your phone by Bluetooth or USB, WMWifiRouter allows multiple computers to access the Internet, just like they would be able to if you had a normal wireless ADSL or cable-modem router. You could accomplish the same thing with tethering, internet connection sharing and an ad-hoc network, but this is a solution that just requires starting one application on your phone. Which means a lot less mucking around.
Though tethering to a single phone is enough in most situations, I regularly play RTS games with my brother in law at his house (which doesn’t have a wireless network and only has a dial-up internet connection). Rather than having to set up ad-hoc networks before we get gaming, it is just a matter of starting the WMWifiRouter application on my phone. The network is available, we are fully connected to the Internet and are ready to go.
If we want to play for more than 3 hours, it is necessary to plug the phone into its charger, otherwise the phone runs out of batteries (this will obviously vary based on your phone’s hardware). WMWifiRouter saves a lot of time and effort. It saves me from having to drag a larger wireless router over to my brother in law’s place (which didn’t give us Internet connectivity), or setting up Internet connection sharing and all the other mucking about involved in setting up a LAN game where there is no existing infrastructure.
