What is Internet Connection Sharing?
My standard answer to this question is to just bite the bullet and purchase a broadband router. In fact my earlier article How should I set up my home network? outlines exactly that setup. But that’s not always practical. For example if all you have is a dial-up connection to the internet, most routers aren’t going to work for you. That’s where something called “Internet Connection Sharing” comes in. • Internet Connection Sharing, or ICS, is exactly what its name implies – a way for a computer to share its connection to the internet. The first problem we encounter when setting up ICS is that the computer whose internet connection we want to share must allow connections to both the internet, and to the other computers that want to share the connection. In the case of dial-up, that typically means the computer needs both a modem or phone connection to connect to the internet, as well as a network connection to connect to the other computers on a local area network or LAN. In the case of
