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Hotel WiFi Bridge

Posted on 20 Dec 2010 in Gadgets

I’ve been travelling a lot in 2010 and one of the frustrations of paid hotel WiFi is that it’s tied to your MAC address and means that I usually only get online with my laptop; leaving the iPhone, iPad etc not connected. I now carry a Apple Airport Express and a cheap small Edimax EW-7416APN Access Point. For hotels that have an Ethernet cable, I plug this straight into the Airport Express and put the Airport in NAT/Router mode (create a network and share a single IP Address) and then DHCP my new network. I usually get a Double NAT warning from the Airport, however it works great. For hotels that are WiFi only, I plug the Edimax EW-7416APN into my laptop via the ethernet initially, log into the Edimax web configuration and associate with the hotel access point in AP Client Mode, I then plug the Edimax ethernet cable into the Airport Express.

I’ve now got my own private WiFi network on the Airport Express bridged to the hotel WiFi via the Edimax or direct via the hotel ethernet cable supporting up to 10 clients (client limitation of the Airport Express). Both the Edimax EW-7416APN and the Airport Express are 100-240v and have interchangeable mains plugs for EU, US, UK, AU. All in all a nice portable solution for getting all my WiFi gadgets online. Only one device needs to authenticate with the paid hotel WiFi via NAT, then all devices can use the connection.

Tech notes: The Airport Express is a critical component of this setup as it supports NAT/Router mode allowing the sharing of the single hotel IP address to my private network in a neat small multi-voltage package. You cannot not use a pair of Airport Expresses to create the bridge (as cool as this would be!) as the Airport Express does not support AP Client mode via the Ethernet connector – in AP client mode the Airport only shares attached printers and supports AirTunes, the ethernet port is disabled.

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