hi all, sadly today my trusty Airport Express finally fried on me after being hauled around the world many times... i am in Thailand currently and can either buy another Airport Express here (at a decent price i found) but also can get an AppleTV here. so, i started wondering...

...is it possible, w/ some tinkering of course, to use an AppleTV as a wireless router? i would need it to take in a connection via ethernet and share it out over wifi to my MBP and iPhone... i do not need amazing range or anything, but would be great if it would be possible to use one for this and still use it for its media capabilities (or some of them at least!).

i'm going to make a purchase today so any insight would be great, thx in advance friends..!

I was actually thinking of the same thing. I've been thinking of getting an AppleTV to use as a File Server (via USB drives), a media center (using XBMC, sorry Apple), and then thought why not use it as a Wireless-N Router as well?

I guess it depends on the limitations of the Adhoc networking that is built into OS X. I haven't taken much time to look into it, but first it would have to support having multiple devices connected to the Adhoc network, and you'd also need some kind of DHCP server running on the AppleTV. I wonder if there is a simple app that can set it all up?

Of course, this is assuming we can get OS X running on Take2. Like I said, haven't done the research, just started to think about it.

Also, think about it this way. Look at all the extra hardware in the AppleTV as compared to an Airport base station. There's what, about $100 difference between the 2, do you think that $100 covers the cost of the extra hardware? What I'm saying is that it almost seems the AppleTV would be a great multi-purpose device if all this was possible on it's stock hardware. Something tells me it's not, but I'm still hoping.

I'm new to this board so not sure if OS X on ATV is the same, but if it is,

Go to System Preferences, Sharing, enable Internet sharing, select the Ethernet as 'from' and share it 'to' Airport.

That should work, you might need to go to network preferences and put in an IP to use between all the machines that will access it ( 10.0.2.1 for a router and then give each machine something like 10.0.2.2 and so on).

I would love to know if this works, it would be an awesome router.

Try this:
http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1122

I have tried to enable the wireless service on my TV.
But I just have Ethernet in the service list. Airport was gone when  detected the Ethernet network.
Too busy this month, don't have time to hack my TV I don't want to pay extra money for the Airport Extreme.