Ideas for using Airport Extreme needed.

[inscrewtable]

A friend of mine has a macbook air and an android phone but no internet access except for the phone. I had an old airport extreme lying around so I thought I'd see what I could do with a local wireless network.

All her music is on an external drive that is plugged into the MacBook air. So I set up the Airport Extreme created a local wi fi and plugged the external drive into the Extreme so that the drive is now showing up as a network device. Now the MacBook can see the external drive and can play music over the wifi plus the drive is searchable.

OK so that's pretty good so far. But now what I'd like to be able to do is somehow use the phone's data to plug into the wifi so that the MacBook can use it, but I can't work out how to do this.

 

[davidg4781]

Wouldn't it be easier to put the phone into personal hotspot mode and have the MacBook connect to it that way? I don't think it would be able to pull internet wirelessly.

Can it pull it through the USB port on the AirPort Extreme? Maybe use the phone to share data through it's USB port? Of course both will mean no external drive on the AE. Does she need to have it connected at all times?

Maybe sell the AE and fund a larger internal HDD.

 

[Nermal]

I agree; it'll be easiest to configure the phone as a hotspot. Otherwise you can use the AirPort as a "receiver" and have it provide the Internet connection over Ethernet, but that's getting a bit convoluted.

 

[inscrewtable]

OK thanks, turns out that it's too unreliable as an external drive so I may have to get rid of it.