*modem noises*

[andrewducker]

My parents have a second home in Devon (which they're going to retire to in 9 months).  My father has a laptop he takes down there.  He's fed up with being attached to the phone point for his internet access - but he's on dialup, and isn't willing to pay £15 a month to go ADSL until he's down there more than 5 days a month.

No problem, I thought, there are bound to be WiFi dialup routers.  And indeed there are - if you're an American.

Anyone in the UK got any suggestions before I suggest he just goes with a bluetooth modem?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Apple Airport Extreme. The expensive version with built-in modem (and socket for external aerial) can do dial-up on demand into an ISP over 56K modem, as well as having an ethernet WAN port for when he finally gets ADSL, and it does 802.11b and 802.11g as well.

Don't go shopping on the high street -- the list price will give you a heart attack -- but poke around eBay.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I forgot: once he's got ADSL he can reconfigure the modem port to accept PPP dial-up and tell the airport to forward incoming connections to a designated host. Makes life really easy when you want to do remote admin or get at a file you forgot to take along. (Maybe not as useful for your dad as for me or thee, but ...)

[andrewducker]

Cheers muchly.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Apple Airport - any version. Original versions are quite cheap on eBay...

[andrewducker]

Aaah, the current non-extreme one doesn't seem to have a dialup modem in it.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

While the airport suggestion is probably best, one other idea is small form-factor 486, FreeCSO Linux, net card, wifi card, pci modem, and lots of rip commands :).

[andrewducker]

Hmm, small white appliance versus obscure PC solution.

Have you considered a career in IT?

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

XFD! Sorry, but...yeah. It's just that for me, 3/486 = free. Airport Extreme Base Station = £150 ish. I currently have £50 in my bank account (Stupid bloody expensive excellent Nintendo consoles...). That's twice as much as my mothers' :). See why skip-diving, hardware-canibalism, and software piracy come so easily to me....:D