Over the years, my Huawei D100 with a 3G stick has done me a good service of distributing 3G Internet access to several devices when I'm traveling. These days, Wi-Fi tethering to a smartphone can do the job as well. But there are some places in the world for which I don't have a 3G prepaid SIM card for Internet access and have to fall back to the Hotel's Wi-Fi coverage. Unfortunately, hotels often only give out a single code for a single device so I resorted of taking a Wi-Fi router with me for using it in combination with my notebook for bridging a single hotel Wi-Fi connection to several devices. This works quite well in practice but the PC has to be powered on all the time and the extra router is obviously a bit bulky. But now I have found the ultimate solution for this problem, the Edimax 6258nL:
Being smaller than a pen (see picture on the right) and powered out of a USB port of a PC or a standard USB charger it does all for which I so far used the notebook and the extra Wi-Fi access point for: It acts as a Wi-Fi client to the hotel Wi-Fi and then distributes this to my devices in a second Wi-Fi network in which it acts as an access point. Network address translation is used between the two, so all the devices just use the single IP address assigned by the hotel network. I tested the device for a couple of days with three client devices and in several host Wi-Fi networks, both non-encrypted like hotel Wi-Fi and encrypted as one would use in other places. It worked fine in all instances. Perfect!
What a nifty product, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
There are also SW based solutions that do this. Have a look at connectify..
I’m close to ordering one of these. 2×2 MIMO and foldout antennas would be nice to overcome bad reception conditions which occur every now and then. And with dualband capability people could avoid the congested 2.4 GHz band on the last leg.