Many hotels still limit you to one or two devices per room — a frustrating limitation, especially when traveling with someone else. Connection restrictions can apply anywhere you have to log into a Wi-Fi network via a portal instead of a standard passphrase.
The next time you’re in a hotel — or anywhere else — that will only let you connect a single device to the Wi-Fi, use these tricks to connect all the devices you might want.
Connect to the Wi-Fi and Share It – Windows Only
Just creating a Wi-Fi hotspot on your laptop won’t necessarily work. Your laptop’s wireless interface can either connect to a Wi-Fi network or host one — it can’t both connect to a Wi-Fi network and host one at the same time.
That’s the way it usually works, anyway. Windows 7 and 8 have support for creating virtual network interfaces, effectively allowing you to both join a Wi-Fi network and host a Wi-Fi hotspot to share that Wi-Fi network with other devices. You don’t need any special hardware. The freeVirtual Router application for Windows allows you to set this up — it effectively works just like the paid Connectify application, which is a pretty interface on top of this hidden Windows function.
Connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot on your Windows laptop and log in. Install the Virtual Router software and you’ll be able to create a Wi-Fi hotspot on your Windows PC. Connect your other devices to that Wi-Fi network and they’ll connect to the main Wi-Fi network through your laptop. (Mac OS X doesn’t have a similar virtual Wi-Fi interface feature, so you’ll need Windows for this.)
Create a Bluetooth PAN
If the devices you want to connect have Bluetooth hardware, you could potentially use Bluetooth to share the connection with them. This requires creating a Bluetooth “PAN”, or “Personal Area Network.”
For example, on a Mac you can open the Sharing interface in the System Services window and enable Internet sharing over “Bluetooth PAN.” Pair your other devices to the Mac via Bluetooth to take advantage of the PAN and the Mac’s Internet connection. This could be a decent option if all you have available to you is a Mac — as long as your other devices have Bluetooth hardware and support the PAN profile, you’re good to go.
Get Multiple Wi-Fi Adapters
Windows users shouldn’t need to do this, but this method will allow Mac users to use the standard “Internet Sharing” feature in Mac OS X to share the connection from one network interface to another.A computer with several physical Wi-Fi interfaces — for example, a laptop with built-in Wi-Fi and a USB-to-Wi-Fi adapter plugged in — can connect to the standard Wi-Fi interface with one of its Wi-Fi adapters and create a Wi-Fi hotspot with the other one, sharing the Internet connection from one with the other.
It’s just as if you had connected the laptop to an Ethernet port and shared that Ethernet connection over Wi-Fi — this is also a good option if the place you’re at offers Ethernet connectivity. The Ethernet connection may be more stable than the potentially spotty Wi-Fi.
Purchase a WiFi-to-WiFi Router
Be sure to purchase a router designed for the purpose of sharing a Wi-Fi connection, not a pocket-sized router designed for connecting to an Ethernet port and creating a single Wi-Fi network.If you’re thinking in advance, you can purchase a router designed specifically for this purpose. You’ll want a router that can do WiFi-to-WiFi routing. In other words, the router needs to be able to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot and create its own Wi-Fi network at the same time.
Plug the router in and it’ll create its own Wi-Fi hotspot. You can then connect to it and use the interface to connect the router to your hotel’s Wi-Fi connection and sign in via their captive portal to give every device connected to your Wi-Fi hotspot access to the Internet.
You don’t necessarily need to rely on your hotel’s painfully slow and obnoxious Internet connection .if you have a smartphone with a decent data plan, you can use tethering to share your smartphone’s data connection with your other devices.
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