iPad and mobile broadband

I recently got given an iPad to play with and considering this was my first time ever using this latest of toys, I was pretty keen on it’s functionality.

I got the device, and managed to configure it and set as many apps on it as I wanted to my hearts content thanks to the wifi at work. But when I got home, the attraction of the device plummeted. This was not due to any fault of the device itself but due to the rather lamentable condition of internet connectivity.

Due to the fact that the area that I inhabit has pair gains setup over its phone lines, I cannot get ADSL connectivity and hence must rely on mobile broadband. This is all well and good but the problem arises when the setup of the mobile broadband refuses to allow shared internet connections through my MacBook over the airport. Hence the decreased interest in my iPad when I got it home.

I tried many things in order to share the connection to my iPad. I tried to share the screen, looked for apps to connect directly to a laptop; I tried a lot of things. In the end, Andrew Humphrey suggested I try to share it over ethernet through a router. I still had a Netgear router lying around from the heady days when I had ADSL and hence decided to use it. Alas, even that let me down.

Daniel Hall made the observation that Netgear routers do not allow static routes and hence I just needed a dumb router, which he was kind enough to lend me the next day.

Hence, as the situation lies, I have a mobile broadband dongle connected to a laptop, sharing the connection over Ethernet to a dmb router which then shares it over wireless to which my iPad connects.

It seems a very round about way of getting wifi to my iPad, but it was the only way. And now that I have wifi, the iPad seems so much more interesting. Let’s see, how long this lasts.