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Can we use an Android phone as a Wi-Fi repeater?

I have my home router which for a variety of reasons I can not switch to WEP. However, I occasionally need to use my Nintendo DS to connect to Nintendo WFC, and it can only use a WEP connection. My current method is to use the Wi-Fi Hotspot feature of my HTC Desire HD to create a temporary WEP network and connect to that using my DS. This is fine, except it forces my phone to use my carrier's data connection instead of my home wireless network, bringing with it associated charges if I hadn't used the internet on my phone that day already.

Is there anyway to share a wireless network instead of the mobile network via the Wi-Fi Hotspot feature?

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Macha
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    I'm hesitant to say "no" in an answer since it's hard to prove a negative, but generally speaking this would require your wifi chip to be in two modes at the same time. This is usually not possible, and would require some other connection between the DS and the phone (if nobody yells at me then I might just re-post this as an answer - I'll Google around in the meantime...). – eldarerathis Mar 25 '11 at 20:23
  • Just to be clear - you want to connect your DS to your phone via wifi and then use the wifi connection between your phone and the router for data? – Daniel Mar 25 '11 at 20:32
  • @Daniel: Correct. – Macha Mar 25 '11 at 20:39
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    Color me impressed: It's actually possible to rebroadcast a wifi signal with only a single card on Win7 using Connectify. Evidently aircrack might have similar capability on Linux, but that's not completely clear from what I'm reading so far. I'm not finding anything similar for Android, though... – eldarerathis Mar 25 '11 at 20:40
  • @Macha Interesting - I'm going to give this a shot tonight when I get home. I'm guessing you are not using a custom ROM – Daniel Mar 25 '11 at 20:41
  • @Daniel: Yeah. Latest HTC firmware version. Using a non-stock ROM would involve a downgrade process I don't really understand too well. – Macha Mar 25 '11 at 20:46
  • This is more of an idea of an alternate route to try, rather than an answer. Part of Froyo's tethering support is that it also supports USB tethering, presumably you have a PC/laptop on your home network, it might be possible to attach your phone to that PC via USB, using the PC's internet connection (reverse tethering essentially), this then leaves your phone's wifi connection free to be shared to your DS. Had a quick Google round, can't see that anyone's tried this but it seems like it would be more possible than using the same wifi antenna for two different network connections. – GAThrawn Mar 29 '11 at 09:32

2 Answers2

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The Desire HD can not be a gateway that supports rebroadcasting wifi with a different encryption, at best you could add an encryption from an open point or broadcast it as open from a secure point.

You would also need two antennas, and the chip does not.

Seth Hikari
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I don't know if the MobileAP setting on my Galaxy S is the "Official" Mobile Access Point component for 2.2-Froyo, but if I try to enable MobileAP when I am already connected to wifi, it tells me that I must first disconnect from wifi before I can share any type of data connection.

Ryan Conrad
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