Posts Tagged ‘wifi’

Being without a proper internet connection I needed to go mobile for a while. I went to O2 and bought a dongle, but it didn’t work, as they never really do. I don’t know if it is the dongle, O2 or a combination of the both, but they are a mission to get working and usually end up never working at all.

So I went to EE and got a 4G wifi hotspot.

My experiences so far have been really good. You literally just turn it on, it connects to the 4G network and you connect it to as a wifi hotspot. The speeds are really impressive too – 20mb down and 10mb up – way faster than you get on a fixed internet connection in Leeds city centre! Unfortunately the data is quite pricey but as a short term solution it has been wonderful.

I also ordered an Asus 6-in-1 router that lets me connect to the wifi hotspot and then gives me a network port to connect my router in. So my router, which has all my wired devices connected into it, was then connected to the Asus, when then connected to the hotspot. Complicated but it got all my devices online with no connection problems!

If you’re using a Cisco Linksys E1000 router, you may have noticed that it creates a guest network – but there is no sign of how to control it or change it through the web interface!

Strangely, that is how it is – Linksys seem to have omitted any kind of control over it from the web interface. The only way you can modify it is to run the Cisco Connect software on your computer.

Launching this will bring up a control panel, of which the bottom left option will be “guest network” and from here, you can make changes.

It also appears, from the list of available wifi networks, that the guest network is not password protected. This isn’t the case if you have set a password, but it does not use the standard WPA or WEP encryption. Instead, it allows clients to connect, but them prompts them for a password before allowing them internet access.