My neighborhood experienced a 5-day internet outage over the Labor Day weekend. I believe that it was due to a fiber cut a few blocks away. Since I have a combined service plan, that meant I lost internet, cable TV, and the single landline I have. Of course, we received no information at all about the status of repairs until they got it fixed more than five days later.
During this time, I switched my cell phone (Samsung S8) to wifi hotspot mode so my wife and I could use our laptops. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), my cell phone battery began to swell after a couple days of hotspotting. The following weekend, I upgraded to a new Samsung S23. While doing so, I found out that I could (1) switch to an “unlimited” data plan at a significant savings when I (2) added an additional line and new phone for $1.99/month.
Now I have a new Samsung A14 5G to keep handy for outages, I don’t actually need the phone or number on a regular basis. But what is the best way to use it? I’ve tried the wifi hotspot feature and it works fine. So does USB tethering for a single laptop. It seems to me I could:
Run the phone as a wifi hotspot and let it go at that. Probably no more than two PCs would connect at any time.
Run the phone as a wifi hotspot, but add an external wifi extender or bridge to improve wifi range. May not help much, but they’re cheap and I have a couple wifi routers I could configure as bridges.
Run the phone in USB tether mode on an older laptop and then configure the laptop as a server/gateway for either a wifi or hardwired LAN (or both). I could add a wifi router to thr laptop using its network card. Seems like a pain to configure, but it would let me add some NAS units and even connect the security cameras.
I’m curious to see if anyone else has been doing this on a regular basis, or even just in the event of an area outage. If so, what works best for you?
I have a Samsung S22 (unlimited data) that I’ve used a couple of times as a hotspot when our internet provider went down. Neither outage was excessive (3-4 hours max), and we both connected our laptops to the hotspot. It worked fine, as you have already observed. Beyond that, however, I didn’t try anything further, such as connecting one or both of our Smart TVs, or attempting to extend the hotspot network via my Orbi meshed wifi.
I’ll add that it seems like we had a more difficult time using our browsers to set up airline reservations and place orders while using the hotspot. I don’t know exactly why. But it had a pretty negative impact on making travel plans and we really needed to set up a family trip in October.
Ideally, I’d love to somehow just substitute the spare cell phone for the internet gateway, allowing all other parts of our household LAN to continue to work normally. It would be slower for the actual internet access, but the existing home router would continue to give us access to NAS units, the ability to print, etc.
I know there are products and services from wireless providers that are intended for this purpose, but I have just a spare new cell phone (with unlimited data), along with a few wifi routers and data switches, to work with. I’d like to be prepared for the next time somebody digs too deep to plant a tree.
If anybody is interested, a speed test shows that wifi hotspotting gets me about 75 megabits/s both up and down. Not great, but not terribly shabby. Certainly useful during an outage.
Attaching the phone by USB to some routers will let the router use the phone as its Internet connection, instead of the usual connection. There is a good chance there is a way to do this if it is an aftermarket router, but almost certainly not possible with something that came from your cable company.
It may even be possible to setup the router to connect to the phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot, and use that as the Internet connection.
If using your existing router isn’t an option, then your laptop plan may be best. How that is best handled will depend on your current setup. Is your router connected to the cable modem by ethernet? Then it might work to unplug the cable modem and plug the router into the laptop/router.
Without major configuration changes, all of those setups will result in double NAT (phone and router) or even triple NAT (phone, laptop/router, regular router). That isn’t the end of the world, but certainly isn’t optimal or efficient.
So for a short outage, and you’ll have to define short yourself, just use the phone as a hotspot and connect whatever devices you actually use to it. For a long outage, it might be worth making changes so your existing network connects over the phone.
As for the poor performance, my guess is that when your neighborhood lost internet, most people were doing just like you, so the mobile network was probably overloaded. That also should be warning that things may work well in testing, but then perform poorly in the next outage.
I haven’t tried to connect the phone to a router using the hotspot tethering, but I rather suspect that most routers won’t allow the USB port to be a gateway port for internet access. I think that most USB ports on routers are intended for administration and external USB devices (printers?).
If someone knows of a router that would accept the USB tethering from my phone, I’d be delighted to learn about it.
Are you sure you have unlimited hotspot data? Because companies usually count that seperately. For instance, my Team Oble Magenta has unlimited high-speed data, but only 40 GB per month high speed hotspotting.
Yes, that’s what was claimed. It’s not cheap, and I (now) have four phones on the plan. I believe I had to add the fourth phone to get this plan. I explained my intentions and they were the ones who suggested this to me. It kind of makes sense, since the data is shared between all phones. I obviously haven’t had it long enough to try it out yet, and they do warn of some “shaping.”
But, in fairness, I’d pay a few bucks extra to at least have the option to work from a cell phone when I lose connectivity through the buried services to my house.
And it now appears that ASUS and some other mfgs have routers that definitely support USB tethering to Android phones, though I’d really prefer not to buy another router.
I work in IT in country notorious for power outages. Despite having a UPS, I often need to resort to tethering my phone. I’ve never needed the Wifi extenders described above.
I have a Mac (well, two Macs) and my reason to post here is that I use Tripmode ( https://tripmode.ch/ ) which is kind of firewall-like, in that you can decide which other apps have internet access.
This means I can grant my work tools access, but not be concerned about, say, system updates intefering with my limited bandwidth and costly data. I seem to recall I paid for it, but I dont see that option on their website. Apparently there is a Windows version, but support is discontinued.
I have heard good things about a similar Windows app called Glasswire, but I have never used it.
Also: man, oh man, I am jealous of the speeds reported up-thread! If I can get 20 up and 5 down, I am a happy, happy software engineer!
I used the hotspot on my Verizon phone for 12 years to run my home internet, also used it quite a few times at work when the office internet went down. It worked fine for two TV’s using Roku’s, two laptops and was still able to use my phone. At work I had as many of 7 coworkers sharing at one time as they worked on “highly” important work.
I had an unlimited plan and Verizon never throttled down my service. It was grandfathered in from a plan I got as a business account and I never told them when I changed jobs. So I got it at a discount. Just recently changed over to a Verizon 5G hotspot and I see no difference.
After my struggles to report the outage and work around it, along with my week-long effort to get my dying S8 replaced/upgraded, I 'm not really in the mood to communicate with them long enough to request a credit. I know I should, if only to maintain the natural order of things, but the credit would probably be less than $40.
OTOH, I definitely will pursue the issue if using my cell phone as a hotspot pushed me over my previous data limits, especially since the provider specifically stated in their (few) outage updates that we should do so.
FWIW, I delt with this last weekend myself. I use Google Fi for cell service, and one of the perks is that I can get a free add-on data-only SIM. I ordered that months ago, just assuming I’ll find a use. When my internet went out, I grabbed an old phone, put the SIM card in, and turned on the hotspot. I limped along with that. It was nice not having it tied directly to my main cell phone, for heating, battery, and location.
Exactly my plan, though with a different cell provider. The Samsung A14 is a bit big and clunky, but it works great as a hotspot.
It appears that the GL.iNet portable routers tout their ability to use a cell phone in hotspot mode by USB tethering. Plus, they are powered by a standard micro USB or USB-C cable. I hate to purchase one just for this purpose, but I’ve verified that my spare TP-Link router will not do this.
I want to emphasize this to the OP, before you get all complacent about your hotspot solution for internet outages. If I set up a hotspot on my phone in normal conditions, it works great, and I can watch a video or run a Zoom meeting without problems. If there’s an outage in my neighborhood, and everyone gets the idea of setting up a hotspot at the same time, throughput drops to a level barely distinguishable from a cellular outage. It takes minutes to load a simple textual web page, if it doesn’t timeout first. For me, a hotspot is completely useless during an outage.
This is an excellent point that was brought up previously. It’s hard to simulate (or even estimate) what an outage situation might be like. I was told that this last outage involved 57 households.
But an outage might also be just a few houses on my street. My wife and I don’t handle e-mail on our phones normally. She downloads e-books to her Fire reader. I do some basic research on-line when I do decide to do billable work. I don’t think our expectations for bandwidth are very high. We realize we won’t be streaming Amazon Prime in FHD. (In fact, I’m one of those old farts who keeps huge numbers of media files here locally so we can entertain ourselves when we inevitably lose the internet. Ho many media files, you ask? About 22 TB worth.)
Finally, our experience during the outage was pretty good using the hotspot for a few days. The downsides were (1) reduced range in the home, (2) apparent overheating of my cell phone, and (3) interruption in service when I had to take my phone and leave the house. Better than nothing…and it can be improved with the spare cell phone and a tethered router (I hope).
I gave this some consideration and then decided against it. It’s my “emergency” router and I know it works when I need it. I normally use an Echo mesh network, but an old-fashioned router come in handy sometimes.
I’m pretty sure that GL.iNet uses DD-WRT. I think their cheapest router is about $35 and it’s a lot smaller (i.e., easier to pack away for when it’s needed) than my big TP-Link. Plus, I can run it on a USB battery pack if it’s a matter of a local power outage that does not affect the local cell towers.
I’ll definitely share my experiences if I get a GL.iNet unit and it works for me.
I traded an older D-Link NAS for a used GL.iNet portable router. The router has a USB port that works out of the box (with latest firmware) with the Samsung A14 in USB tethering mode. It only took a couple steps. Right now, with no local or regional outages, I’m getting 130 megabits/s down and 90 megabits/s up on a laptop connected to the router by WiFi. I’d consider this a reasonable solution, even though I understand that my speeds will be much, much lower in the even of an outage where other customers are trying to use their cells as hotspots.
