Extending WiFi range throughout your place is a tedious job. Some routers are pretty much capable of doing this and some really does not penetrate out of the source room. WiFi range extenders if bought from the market may put a big hole in your pocket. There are cheap options though but settings them up is again something not everyone’s cup of tea.
Everyone today has got a smartphone and this particular feature is built in your device. Tethering your WiFi using your smartphone is the cheapest and the easiest means available today. You do not have to spare a dime on it.
What’s the Catch?
A feature known as Wi-Fi tethering will automatically transform your smartphone into a wireless internet router. This feature is baked into the majority (not all) of the smartphones available today. Earlier you were able to tether your carrier data service and creating a hotspot for other devices to share the internet service. Now you can easily create a WiFi hotspot using the same feature but now it consumes the already existing WiFi range in your home or office. Using the feature you can now extend your WiFi range to other rooms in your apartment.
Setup WiFi Tethering or Hotspot?
Before you begin, make sure you have Android version 5.0 or above. Charge your phone completely as this setup which in operation would consume a lot of power hence a constant look at the charge would be an ease. At the of writing this post, we are using POCOPHONE F1 with Android 9 Pie.
Step 1 – Head towards your settings panel.
Step 2 – Click on “Network & Internet“.
Step 3 – Now select “Hotspot & Tethering“.
Step 4– Select Wi-Fi Hotspot.
Step 5 – Setup your Wi-Fi Hotspot.
Step 6 – Select your hotspot name, input security as WPA2 PSK, input your desired password, you can also select the option to turn off hotspot if no devices are connected. You can also have an option to select the band as 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band.
Step 7 – Once done, switch toggle on the Wi-Fi and hotspot from the notification panel of your android smartphone.
Things to keep in mind
- Setup the hotspot with a password only, else it will be used by others in your network range.
- One the setup if done and required devices are connected you can easily just toggle between the home Wi-Fi or the carrier data service for easy internet access.
- The steps shown above may vary as per your device. So please have a look at the same in the hotspot or tethering section of your settings panel.
- Some cell phone companies could charge you extra for using this feature. Take time to learn about the data restrictions on your data plan before you use it as a Wi-Fi hotspot.
- We cannot ensure that this feature would be present on all the smartphone even if they are updated to the latest version and have flagship specs. You have to check your self.
How to check if your Phone can create a WiFi Hotspot ?
Once set up is done as shown above. Switch off your carrier data and Wifi. Now enable the hotspot and then toggle WiFi on. If the phone disconnects with the WiFi and enables the carrier data by default. Bad news this feature is not present on your device.
By rooting you can get this feature if the phone supports the same through the hardware. But we are not going into rooting in this post.
