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I'm trying to bridge my laptop's wireless internet connection to my PS4 (the PS4 has spotty wireless while my laptop does not), but every time I bridge the wireless adapter's connection with the wired adapter, the laptop immediately loses connection to the internet. Any thought?

Mark Dengler
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3 Answers3

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Your problem is likely caused by Windows preferring to use the wired connection for internet access despite having both configured. You can find a workaround to force Windows to prefer the wireless connection at Can't bridge WIFI and ethernet, because wireless disconnects when I connect ethernet cable (also there is a Microsoft KB article somewhere that says it sometimes doesn't work when the wifi adapter doesn't support promiscuous mode).

Failing that. You could use the "Internet Connection Sharing" feature:

First, on your laptop, wifi must be enabled and connected, and wired must be enabled and the cable must be plugged in and the connection active.

Right click the wireless adapter, choose properties -> sharing -> allow other users to connect through this computers network connection. Everything will then be set up once you press OK on these dialogs.

Now on your PS4 configure it to use DHCP (or obtain IP settings automatically, or however they word it). Your laptop is now acting as a router. You will have to configure any port forwarding for incoming connections just like on a normal router; you can do this back in the properties -> sharing -> settings window of the wifi adapter.

When you want to stop, just disable sharing again in the wifi properties and your laptop will return to normal.

See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc783558(v=ws.10).aspx for more information on network bridging and internet connection sharing.

Community
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Jason C
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I had the same issue when attempting to use my laptop as a bridge, such that the PS4 is plugged into the laptop via LAN, and the laptop is connected to the wifi. It turns out that there is a setting in the BIOS called "Wireless Radio Control", or something similar. After disabling the feature, I am able to use both LAN and Wifi connections and setup a bridge. I still haven't gotten the PS4 to use it correctly, but that's a different issue.

bhardwick
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How could this possibly work? Think about it -- when the laptop receives a packet from the PS4 and needs to send it to the access point, what source MAC address should it use? If it uses its own, how would it know to route the reply to the PS4? If it uses the PS4's, how would the access point know it was receiving a packet from one of its clients?

You can't bridge a WiFi client connection. If you could, there would be no need for WDS to be configured on both sides, you could just connect as a client and bridge. What you're attempting to do doesn't make any sense -- an access point will only send packets over the air to its clients, and you only have a single client connection and thus only a single client.

Probably the most sensible thing for you to do is to get a good wireless client adapter and use it to connect your PS4 to your wireless network. Alternatively, you can set up Internet connection sharing on your laptop. But you can't bridge into a wireless network when you're only connected to an access point as a client.

David Schwartz
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