Wireless dialup for PDAs?

[compooterman]

I am currently looking into buying eirther a PDA or a PDA/Cellphone such as a Treo. I know that with a PDA/Cellphone to access the internet you simply use your cellphone service and have to pay for the amount of megabytes that you look at. What I'm interested in knowing is if I was to get a PDA only that is "wireless internet" compatible, such as the 802.11b(?), what would I need to connect to my dial-up access at home?

[FastLearner]

If you find a PDA that is 802.11b compatible, then theoretically you could use it just as you would any other computer that has a 802.11b compatible NIC.

In this case, you have two options to connect using your dial-up access at the same time as your wireless PDA. In either case, you need to (unless your PDA has a built-in modem that you can connect directly to the phone jack with a standard telephone cable):

1) Equip another computer on your network with a "wireless" 802.11b (or 802.11g is also backward compatible) NIC (network interface card). This is so the PDA can communicate with your PC without running wires. If you go with Option 2 (below) then you could get away with a standard "Ethernet" adapter card (not wireless).

Then you could:

1) use the two cards to set up an ad-hoc network and use the ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) services of your desktop so that you could connect to the Internet from the PDA. Which OS does your Home PC have--it will matter when enabling ICS, although the procedure is very similar for all Windows OSs.

or you could:

2) Buy a wireless router (802.11b supported) that supports dial-up connections (very important, as not all do). This way you could hard-wire your PC with Cat5 cable to the router, and your PDA could connect wirelessly to the router. The router will, in this case, act as an Internet Gateway (entry point) for all of your networked computers and devices.

Hope this helps.