Cell phone tethering and hurricanes

I live in Gainesville, Florida, USA. We recently had hurricane Irma come through the SE USA and destroy lots of stuff. My power was out for a while but when it came back my Internet access, through a cable modem, did not work. The cable company is run by idiots and couldn’t figure it out.

The good news is I was able to tether my cell phone to my Omnia to provide Internet access to everything in my house. I was amazed at how well it worked and how easy it was to set up. I tried two ways, both of which worked nicely. One way was to use my phone as a hotspot. I went to the Wireless menu in Luci, selected radio 1, ran a scan to find my phone hotspot and clicked Join Network. The radio then is a client to that network and an access point for my wireless network.

The second option was USB tethering. When I plugged the phone in, a new network interface USB0 was magically defined. I went to Network/Interfaces configured that for DHCP and use as the default route. When I started it everything in house was back on line without any further configuration.

I decided to use USB tethering because that kept the phone charged and everything online. I want to thank OpenWRT/Project LEDE/Turris for being so easy to use and helping to keep me sane during this event.

Bill

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Dear Bill,
I am really happy that you are safe after the terrible disaster you had to go through and I hope your family and friends are also okay.

It’s wonderful how such a small thing can help other people. This part of the software is not our work, we got it from upstream, but we are really happy to serve you with our complete solution even in the hard times. I hope that you will get your regular uplink soon, it has to be hard to reapir the whole cable system after such a strong hurricane…
If you want, you can also share your experience in our community documentation. We’ll be very happy because sharing is caring. :blush: I hope you won’t be disappointed that I shared your post on Twitter. I’m sure your idea will help other users in a situation similar to yours.

Don’t hesitate to tell me if we can help some way…

Take care!
Václav

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