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Is it possible to turn a computer with an internet connection into an ISP of sorts and share that internet connection with remote computers in another city state or country with a slow/inferior internet connection?

Basically I was hoping that somehow using remote desktop, a VPN, or some other method, I could improve the speed of an already existing internet connection.

Imagine your main PC is at your house, internet connection is great. Then you travel to another state or country and they've got terribly slow internet at the motel. How do you connect to your computer somehow to leverage your home internet connection to effectively boost the internet speed etc on your device at the motel?

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    Please edit your question to indicate how the remote computer will be connecting to yours in order to share the internet? Consider that a telephone hot spot provides internet connectivity to nearby phone users in a wireless manner, limited to range. Another state or country? Will you provide a very long wire or uniquely powerful radio communications connection?
    – fred_dot_u
    Commented May 3 at 21:17
  • Also be prepared for it to operate 24 hours a day non stop. And I wonder whether your own ISP will be happy (no, probably not)
    – anon
    Commented May 3 at 21:28
  • Often inter country connects are the bottleneck. One of my historic ISP's fineprint was you got a gigabit connection for local sites, while overseas sites where throttled to 100mbps or so.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented May 6 at 4:42

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Is it possible to turn a computer with an internet connection into an ISP of sorts and share that internet connection with remote computers in another city state or country with a slow/inferior internet connection

I wouldn't describe it as "an ISP of sorts", and you'll need a suitable connection or agreement from the hypothetical computer's actual ISP to do this... but yes, it is indeed theoretically feasible to setup a midpoint service that could take various steps to reduce the required bandwidth - for example adding compression, reducing image quality, transcoding media in real-time, etc...

This hypothetical situation goes beyond standard VPN services which may add compression to the link (with varying levels of benefit), but won't intefere with the media within - acting only as a conduit.

This approach will also fall apart immediately if you have any desire or requirement to maintain the chain of trust used so extensively across the modern internet, as the requested assets will not be visible to the midpoint service. The alternative is to put all of your trust in the midpoint service and install a custom root certificate on the remote endpoints using it... I do not recommend this approach, as that midpoint service would have total control and insight into your traffic. You'd also likely lose out on access to any DRM protected media (e.g: streaming services).

As above... it's theoretically possible, yes... but I can't really recommend you think about this much beyond the hypothetical / thought experiment stage.

or no internet connection whatsoever?

I'll presume that existing connection options are unavailable (including: dial-up, xDSL, cable, xPON, cellular, satellite, etc...), and other options are unfeasible (e.g: cable laying, point-to-point wireless, etc...), in which case, where exactly are you?! Services like Starlink appear to have a pretty decent reputation for remote properties without other options.

If you do indeed have no options, then... no - how would you get data to the location if you can't run a cable or make a link?

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  • Thanks. Basically I was hoping that somehow using remote desktop or a VPN somehow I could, improve the speed of an already existing internet connection. The main PC is at your house. Then you travel to another state or country and they've got terribly slow internet at the motel. How do you connect to your computer somehow to leverage your home internet connection to effectively boost the internet speed etc on your device at the motel.
    – R Corp
    Commented May 4 at 19:13
  • @RCorp this doesn't make any sense. You do realize that you still have to connect to your machine, right? Adding another layer doesn't solve any kind of problem here if you e.g want to download a huge file in motel. Even if you compress it on the other machine you'll still likely fail to download it if motel's connection is abysmal. And the "no internet" partis science-fiction. I would recommend reading on how internet works as a good starting point.
    – Destroy666
    Commented May 5 at 3:49
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So basically an answer to your question is held within comments to your question.

You absolutely can host your own VPN service with your devices, but that’s whole another topic, and it is probably isn’t what you asked for.

For the internet connection hosting, It is not possible in your case for several reasons:

  • You need to have an awfully long optical fiber cables to run across the country. ISP have access to them (and you don’t), that’s basically the internet data transfers.
  • You need to host internet somehow. You can use media converter and convert electrical signal to an optical one (since utp cables only go for about 150m) and run that signal for kilometres. You can host internet via your router so it’s not really of an issue since it already works 24/7.

There are some more details to this, but I’m lazy to write more cause this question is in itself is absurd.

Summarising your question: You can share the internet for very far distances, mind that it will cost AWFULLY LOT and will require INHUMANE amount of effort to run the cables.

Or you can hack the isp tho… who said it wasn’t an option?

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  • Thanks for the response. Basically I was hoping that somehow using remote desktop or a VPN somehow I could, improve the speed of an already existing internet connection.
    – R Corp
    Commented May 4 at 19:10

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