DSL line, two computers?

Question

My home office is in a separate building 100 feet from the house. Phone lines/DSL are in both buildings. Have router, but not really practical stringing ethernet wire through the trees and under the lawn mowers. Wireless? The main computer does not have any more IDE slots. I will have to pull something out to put a wirless card in. Question: Can two computers share one DSL line without using routers or wireless?

I have two or three DSL Modems

Dr House, do you charge extra for climbing the oak tree to string the ethernet cable? Hard ethernet connection would be difficult and dangerous

Answer 1

Not without networking. You can however buy a wireless router and a hi gain wifi antenna for your system. You can also purchase a signal extender but all this will cost you some fat cash! Wireless is more vulnerable to attack also. You also might get by if the 2 PCs are in line of site with each other and may not need the signal booster. There are also directional wifi antennae on the market. If it was me, I would be stringing the cable!

Answer 2

Your DSL line's hardware is only made to support one modem. Adding another modem would like casue interference between the two modems, and neither would work. There are several hardware reasons for this. More Importantly, most DSL ISP carriers only provide one IP address per DSL modem. The more IP addresses that an ISP gives each client, the fewer clients the ISP can support. This concept usually restricts you to one computer directly connected to your DSL modem. To connect a second computer to the DSL modem, you should buy an internet DSL router. These routers play a game with your DSL line to allow you to connect more computers. The DSL router gives every attached computer its own IP address. No matter which computer uses the internet, the router uses the same ISP provided IP address on the DSL side of the line. However, the DSL router changes the Port number in the IP packet that is going to the internet, from each computer. The internet always returns the response packet with the same port number. The DSL router reads the port number of the return packet and sends it to the computer that that has its IP address assigned to that port number on your home network. This is the game that the DSL router plays with the DSL line and ISP provider. It is a game because IP packet port numbers were never meant to be used in this way. However, because their are many undesignated port numbers, the router is free to use them in this fashion. This is how the DSL router allows more than one computer to use the internet at the same time. Although, there are over one thousand port numbers, most DSL home routers will not assign more than 255 ports. The bandwidth of a home DSL line would be overloaded at less than half this number of computers attached to one DSL home router. So it is not a problem. I hope this answer helps you. There is also another to your question, if you don't want to buy a DSL router. You can use Windows XP to make one computer an internet server and connect the other computer to a hub or switch. Then, connect one of the hub or switch connections to the computer that is plugged into the internet modem. The Windows XP network setup has pictures to show you how to do this.

Answer 3

Yes, you can share a DSL line w/o any router or wireless network. Just connect your 2 computers using a crossover utp cat5e cable through the ethernet ports and setup a LAN, and have one of your computer (pc1) to act as a gateway to connect to the DSL modem. In that way, the computer that does not connect directly to the modem (pc2) can access the internet through pc1. However, the main drawback is that pc1 has to be on while you access the internet using pc2.

Answer 4

If you can connect them both to the input of your modem. But that is unlikely as most modems just have one input and that is why you use routers.

Ron

Answer 5

PS You don't have to use a IDE port, just use a usb port