Connecting to a Mobile WiFi hotspot

prisonhacker · July 6, 2023, 6:16pm

Currently, I’m in a halfway house with no internet and might get sent off to prison

That aside, my phone can connect to a WiFi hotspot provided by my at home internet provider…and there is one 50 feet too far from me.

I tried a range extender and it found it, but wanted to connect with a standard WiFi “password only.”

These hotspots require my internet providers “username/login” and “password.” Two sets of credentials.

Can I do this with openwrt? I have a WRT3200ACM at home I’m considering having mailed to me to achieve such a feat.

Wondering also if I might need a IMEI/sim dongle as I think it might be tied to my phone. This model has usb ports and I read this might be possible for 4G/5G LTE.

Falco · July 7, 2023, 8:27am

Not sure, but maybe you can do something with the Travelmate package installed on your WRT3200AC?

github.com

openwrt/packages/blob/master/net/travelmate/files/README.md

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# travelmate, a wlan connection manager for travel router

## Description
If you’re planning an upcoming vacation or a business trip, taking your laptop, tablet or smartphone give you the ability to connect with friends or complete work on the go. But many hotels don’t have a secure wireless network setup or you’re limited on using a single device at once. Investing in a portable, mini travel router is a great way to connect all of your devices at once while having total control over your own personalized wireless network.  
A logical combination of AP+STA mode on one physical radio allows most of OpenWrt supported router devices to connect to a wireless hotspot/station (STA) and provide a wireless access point (AP) from that hotspot at the same time. Downside of this solution: whenever the STA interface looses the connection it will go into an active scan cycle which renders the radio unusable for AP mode operation, therefore the AP is taken down if the STA looses its association.  
To avoid these kind of deadlocks, travelmate will set all station interfaces to an "always off" mode and connects automatically to available/configured hotspots.  

## Main Features
* STA interfaces operating in an "always off" mode, to make sure that the AP is always accessible
* easy setup within normal OpenWrt environment
* strong LuCI-Support with builtin interface wizard and a wireless station manager
* render the QR-Code of the selected Access Point in LuCI to comfortably transfer the WLAN credentials to your mobile devices
* fast uplink connections
* support all kinds of uplinks, incl. hidden and enterprise uplinks (WEP-based uplinks are no longer supported!)
* continuously checks the existing uplink connection (quality), e.g. for conditional uplink (dis-) connections
* automatically add open uplinks to your wireless config, e.g. hotel captive portals
* captive portal detection with internet online check and a 'heartbeat' function to keep the uplink connection up & running
* captive portal auto-login hook (configured via uci/LuCI), you are able to reference an external script for captive portal auto-logins (see example below)

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prisonhacker · July 7, 2023, 3:23pm

That might work. Couldn’t really tell. I might give it a shot, thanks

mk24 · July 7, 2023, 3:34pm

It sounds like Enterprise authentication. This is supported by OpenWrt though you will need to replace the standard wpad-basic software package with the full version. If you're not moving from place to place Travelmate is not that important; you can directly configure.

Some ISP require a phone app to connect, and the user and password credentials are secret from the customer and only stored inside the app. That system cannot be run on OpenWrt. If you do have a known username and password and entered them into the wifi settings of the phone, that could also run on OpenWrt.

I prefer a CPE for distance situations. A desktop router does have better wifi range than a phone but not a huge difference.