Share an Internet connection with Virtual Router

This article is for the road warriors among us…

While travelling its not uncommon to have to pay for access to a hotel, airport or airline wireless network in order to access the Internet. Whilst this generally isn’t an issue for the lone business man, when traveling with groups of people it can get very expense.

Enter Virtual Router!

Virtual Router, available at http://virtualrouter.codeplex.com, is a virtual router for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 systems. Based on Microsoft’s Wireless Hosted Network (Virtual Wifi) technology, virtual router allows you to share the wireless (or LAN) connection on your computer with multiple other computers. It does this by emulating the behavior of a wireless router and allows your colleges to connect to a SSID (wireless network name) that you define with a WPA2 password you set, then share the same connection your using.

The configuration interface is straight forward:

And consists of three user-configurable options:

Network Name (SSID) – Use this option to set your wireless network name, for example “Super Wireless”

Password – Use this option to set your WPA2 password. When any of your colleges want to access your shared connection they will need to enter this.

Shared Connection – Select the local connection you want to share. For example, if your connected to a hotel network via LAN then you should select “Local Area Network Connection”, if your connected via wireless select “Wireless Network Connection”.

Stop/Start Button – Once you’ve configured your network name, password and selected your connection click ‘Start’ to begin sharing your connection and when your finished click ‘Stop’.

Its that easy!