I’ve tried this at home. but the problem is that I have a PPPOE internet connection that simply doesn’t want to share itself. Is there way out of this? Pain in the ass really. My router PC, so to speak, is a Dell Laptop with a wireless USB stick adapter. The network works, I get it on my other laptop, the internet is working well of course on the Dell. But no access otherwise.

Is there any other trick to share the PPPOE connection?

As far as needing a PCI-based wireless card for desktops go – there are several cheaper USB based cards available in the market today. I would recommend that people go for these USB cards simple because they are easy to install and extremely portable.

The biggest drawback of this mechanism is the bad scalability numbers. The available band width decreases as the number of wireless clients go up. In fact, this decrease is not gradual or graceful; the decrease is of factorial magnitude! For n wireless clients there is a (n-1)! decrease in bandwidth. So you can use this mechanism for three wireless clients at most. In fact, that is exactly the kind of users who will want this solution to begin with. If you have many wireless clients, then you are better off investing in a router to begin with.

This method requires the gateway to be on all the time. Plus if a desktop is a gateway, it means the user has to install a PCI based wireless netword card.