Turn your Windows 10 PC into a router
WE REVEAL HOW YOU CAN USE YOUR WINDOWS LAPTOP OR DESKTOP AS AN INTERNET ROUTER — AND WHY YOU’D WANT TO!
YOU MAY BE forgiven these days for thinking that a router and a modem is the same thing. Most standalone DSL modems are also routers, switches and access points all in one. Which is very convenient, but there may come a situation where you’d prefer to use your PC as the router. You’ll still need a modem, since your PC can’t speak DSL or LTE (that’s what a modem does — translates signals between different media), but you can use your PC as the router, so that it handles things like figuring out routes across the internet, sharing the connection, and assigning and translating network addresses for local devices.
Now you may be asking: why would anyone do this? There are a few reasons you might: 01 You’d like to share your USB LTE modem with other networked devices.
02 You have a VPN connection that you’d like to share with other devices.
03 The hamster and his rusty wheel that power your current router are struggling to keep up with your performance needs. This is especially common with cheap modem routers trying to support heavy BitTorreting and online gaming.
04 You have fibre to the home and you’d like to connect your PC directly to the socket without needing to buy a router.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
Most PCs will have all the hardware they need built in, but in some cases you may need an extra physical port.
Essentially, the PC you’re turning into a router will need both a WAN port and a LAN port, though wireless can serve as the latter. The WAN port is the one that communicates with the internet; the LAN port is the one that talks to your local network.
If you’re using an LTE modem, then that’s your WAN port, so you don’t need anything else. You can just use your PC’s Ethernet port or wireless to connect to the LAN.
If you’re sharing a VPN connection, then the VPN connection is your WAN port. It can actually share the same physical port as the LAN port (that is, you only need one physical Ethernet port) — the VPN connection appears as a separate ‘virtual’ port in Network Connections.
The same is true if you’re connecting to the internet via PPPoE, which is what you might be doing if you’re bypassing a cheap DSL router.
Finally, if you’re on FTTH or HFC cable, it’s probably best to have a second Ethernet adapter (USB or PCIe) in your PC. In this scenario you’d plug one Ethernet cable into the wall socket (for FTTH) or cable modem (for HFC) and the other into a local switch or wireless access point (although if you only use wireless you can also set the PC up as a hotspot).
SETTING YOUR CURRENT ROUTER TO BRIDGED MODE
This step only applies if you have an existing DSL modem router that you want to bypass (as in the final scenario above). You’ll need to disable the router functions on the modem router (so it just becomes a modem), and you do that by setting it to bridged mode.
You’ll need to log into the router’s admin console and find the basic internet settings. You’ll see the connection type, which will likely be PPPoE or PPPoA. Before you change anything you should make a note of the password and username, which are the details you use to log into your ISP. You’ll be needing these later. Then you can switch it to bridged mode and save. You’ll lose you internet connection for the moment.
Once you’ve done that, you can log out of your router.
You now need to make a direct connection to your ISP from the PC. Go to ‘Settings > Network & Internet > Network and Sharing Center’. Click on ‘Set up a new connection or network’.
Select ‘Connect to the internet’ from the list of available options and click Next, then select
Broadband (PPPoE). Enter your ISP’s username and password and check the box to allow other users to access it. When you’re done it will (hopefully) connect and you’ll later see that there’s a new adapter created in Network Connections, named whatever you chose (default is ‘Broadband connection’). You should now have access to the internet on the PC; you just need to share it with the other devices on your network.
ENABLING INTERNET CONNECTION SHARING
So you’ve now got broadband on your PC. You just need to share it. This part’s easy.
You need to go to Network Connections. Right click on your Start button (or press Windows + X) and select Network Connections. Then click on Change adapter options. This will show all the network ports on your PC.
Now you need to find the one that is your WAN port. If you created a PPPoE connection (as above), it will be named whatever you named it during setup. If you have a USB LTE modem, that will appear as its own item. A VPN connection will appear as a TAP driver. Or if you’re just using an Ethernet port to connect to an FTTH box or cable modem, it will be a standard Ethernet port. Then just follow these steps: 01 Right click on the WAN connection and select properties.
02 Go to the Sharing tab and check the box to ‘Allow other users to connect through this computer’s internet connection’.
03 Under ‘Home networking connection’, you’ll have a drop down box. It’s in this box that you choose your LAN port. That the port that you’re using to connect to the other devices on your local network. Most commonly it will be one of the Ethernet ports, though you might also choose wireless (or a hotspot if you’ve created one — see below).
04 Click OK. What will happen now is that ICS will start, turning the PC into a router with both DHCP enabled and NAT switched on, so that other devices on your local network will automatically find and use the PC as their gateway to the internet. The local IP address of the device you selected as the Home networking connection will be changed to 192.168.137.1 (which is only really relevant if you need to know the gateway IP address for manual configuration of clients). All done! Unless you want your PC to also be a Wi-Fi access point, that is.
WIRELESS
ICS may turn your PC into a router, but it does not turn it into a wireless access point. If you want to use the PC as a hotspot as well, you’ll need to go through a few extra steps.
We’ve covered that before in this column in TechLife 52, so we won’t go over it all again here. The short version is that to turn your PC into an access point, you can use an app like Connectify ( www.connectify.
me) or you can issue two command lines in the command prompt (where SSID and Password are the network name and password for Wi-Fi):
netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=<SSID> key=<Password> keyUsage=persistent netsh wlan start hostednetwork Once you’ve set up your PC as a hotspot, a new device will appear in Network connections. If you set this device up as ICS’s Home networking connection then any device that connects to it will use the shared network connection, gaining full access to the internet through the PC.