Getting guide data w/o phone line via wireless broadband card

[moscovitzd]

I have a friend with a Series 2 Standalone Humax Tivo. She does not have a landline because she uses a cell phone. She has internet service via a laptop that uses a broadband card. Is it possible to use the broadband card/laptop to pull down guide data for the Tivo? I can provide her with a Wireless G adapter for the Tivo and the laptop already has a built in Wireless G adapter. Thanks in advance for your suggestions/advice.

[logicman1]

What flavor of internet service (cable, FIOS, etc.)? Is there a router between the internet connection and laptop?

[moscovitzd]

She doesn't have cable internet or FIOS internet. She has a laptop with a PC card that provides wireless broadband internet access from AT&T. She does not have a router currently.

[logicman1]

I don't think that is going to work but I am not familiar enough with this type of internet service to say with certainty. Not sure if that internet connection is sharable the way cable or FIOS is. TiVo really needs a full time connection to a network so it can connect as needed.

[slude]

Yes, your friend can use the broadband card/laptop to pull down guide data for the Tivo but there are "inconveniences" she will have to deal with.

The two basic approaches she can take are:
1) buy and setup a Wireless-G router designed for use with a mobile broadband card. Linksys has a series WRT54G3G with model number suffixes to denote the wireless carrier whose cards they're designed to work with: "-AT" (AT&T), "-SM" (Sprint) and "-VN" (Verizon). This route has fewer "inconveniences" than the other but the HW will cost in the $200 USD range. Its two main "inconveniences" are that she will need to remove the card from the router when she wants to travel with her laptop and that the Tivo will download software updates, etc. over the broadband connection in addition to guide data. Depending on the broadband internet service she has, I suppose that could push her over the per-month data limits imposed by her provider.
2) setup an Ad-Hoc (Peer) Wifi network where the laptop shares its internet connectivity. All OSes starting from Windows 98 onward should support this. MS has instructions on how to set it up in XP at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306126 but if she's using a different OS you should be able to find comparable instructions on the web. This has an obvious price advantage over the HW router above as well as avoiding the need to move the broadband card around when leaving the house, but shares the disadvantage of the Tivo data downloads possibly pushing her over her monthly data limit. It also imposes an additional "inconvenience" in that she will need her laptop turned on and connected to the broadband service provider for the Tivo to download its data. Since that typically occurs overnight she will either need to find a way to make sure her laptop doesn't disconnect overnight or accept the extra burden of using the Tivo menus every other week or so to manually force a data download at a time when she knows the laptop connection is in-place.

Personally I'd go with the Ad-Hoc network and manually forcing the Tivo to do its downloads if only so I could keep a real-time eye on the Tivo's use of download capacity vs. monthly usage limit.

[moscovitzd]

Thanks Slude. I like your 2nd option. I have seen the mobile broadband routers from Linksys but the cost of those deterred me from making that suggestion. My friend has a limited budget so I'm trying to help her on the cheap.

I did see this while I was web surfing:

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9904137-1.html

It looks interesting but I'm not sure it truly provides any advantages over your ad-hoc network + ICS solution.

[jasi10562]

do after i change the setting on my laptop than what