This phone is broken (broken screen) and was given to me, so I figured I’d use it as a WiFi extender, but I guess I can’t.
I find it hard to believe all your other phones could do this as it required dual antennas.
If you just want a local network with DHCP and WPA to do whatever, no uplink is necessary.
Hotspots share your phones mobile data as a local wifi access point. If you don’t have a sim, you don’t have mobile data, and so, no hotspot.
you can do “wifi sharing” which shares the phones wifi connection.
Not all phones can act as a repetitor. I’ve had several where wifi gets disconnected when hotspot is activated.
Thats not the same thing, though.
Well to be fair, on my pixel at least, those are literally the same setting. Which it actually is just depends on if you’re currently on WiFi or not. Kinda Google’s fault for labelling it like that.
Its in the same menu
what if you want to use the wifi hotspot for a LAN party in a plane?
I don’t know if it’s android or Samsung doing this. Both are trash.
On the android side it’d be because Google seemingly hires the dumbest project managers possible for the thing.
Samsung side I’d waver itd be because they think their customers would be too stupid to diagnose an issue with hotspot without a sim (such as if WiFi is working)
Do you normally have SIMless service? 🤨
The hotspot function basically just lets you connect other devices to the Internet through the phone’s cell service. No service == no hotspot.
Apps may allow you to use it as a range extender tho.
My phone does that just fine. It’s a Samsung limitation. All it does is create an access point and forward traffic via its default route.
My phone will hotspot when it’s connected to WiFi. I can even tether it to a desktop PC and use it as a WiFi adapter.
Well, technically that’s not a “hotspot”. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it’s a Wi-Fi extender.
And a poor Wi-Fi extender as well, since you halve your network bandwidth by using an extender with a single radio chip.
I’ve only seen that option on phones with two radios, it uses the 2.4GHz radio for one connection and the 5GHz radio for the other
That’s kinda required. I doubt one antenna can simultaneously send and receive.
Anyway, there’s still only one controller, so your bandwidth is still halved.
An antenna can absolutely send and receive at the same time. It’s called duplex .
Oh, I should clarify; this is more than send and receive - there’s some amount of network routing involved with being a Wi-Fi extender or relay or whatever.
What I probably meant to say is one antenna cannot send/receive simultaneously on more than one network.
But, yes, duh, thank you for calling me out on that one!
Might be someone wanting to share the WiFi on something like a tablet. Or someone using an Android phone as an “iPod Touch”, basically everything the phone has minus cellular capabilities but still wanting to share the WiFi with other devices.
I could see this being very popular on flights and cruises where they charge you per device to pay for this one device and then share with other devices.
The device can just connect to whatever wifi network the tablet is connected to. There’s no reason to “share the wifi connection”.
I could see this being very popular on flights and cruises where they charge you per device to pay for this one device and then share with other devices.
Does it have to be a SIM card with service on it? If not, maybe grabbing a random old SIM card would work.
Random sim card work thankfully
Unless specifically using the phone as repeater, just connect directly to wifi?
Any laptop can also be converted into repeater.
Edit: Missed the little paragraph, look for wifi extender apps.
- Because they want to know who you are
- Because what are you going to do about it? They’re going to make money regardless
One or the other
