I'm looking to see if I can construct/configure a network setup that will still allow Internet connectivity (albeit via dial-up) when my broadband connection is down.

Currently have a Linksys WAG54G2 modem/router as the central point of a network. On occasions (not often, admittedly) we 'lose' our broadband connection - although not at the physical level; the associated phone line works just fine.

Under these conditions, currently, one user fires up the dialup modem on their laptop and we take turns as needed to use the Internet. Hardly effective.

My thoughts were to leverage the Internet Connection Sharing function of that laptop and have the router "point" to the IP address of the laptop and effectively on-share that connection. By keeping the router as part of the mix, things like DHCP aren't impacted on the rest of the network.

I was looking at the Static and Dynamic routing options in the Linksys unit and trying to route traffic to the IP address of the laptop - but my knowledge in this area is minimal and despite some 'Googling' couldn't find a solution (most normally presented as communicating between different LAN segments) that I could 'convert' to my scenario.

First question - is this even possible? Or is the Linksys unit always going to be focussed on passing traffic through the broadband connection?

Or is there a better/different way that the same outcome may be achieved?

Many thanks for any assistance.