I like to sit out on my front porch and surf using my Acer Chromebook. Problem is that my router is down in the basement, at the opposite corner of my house from the porch, so the signal keeps getting dropped.
I know I can link an iPad to my iPhone when I’m away from home and can use the wireless plan on my iPhone to access the web on my iPad.
Can I do the same with a Chromebook, so if I have my iPhone in my pocket I can link to it?
If so, how?
Yes, the same way you would link your iPad. Create a hotspot on your phone, then go into wifi settings on the Chromebook and connect to the phone’s hotspot the same way you normally connect to your home wifi. Be aware that your cellular service probably has a data limit, so if you do things that are very data intensive like watching video you’ll need to be aware of your data usage.
Thanks, will try. I mainly surf text sources, not videos, so shouldn’t be a problem.
Little additional as a former tech worker for a major cell carrier.
Check the details of your smartphone plan. Many plans and carriers have different speed and caps for their wifi hotspots than the ‘on-phone use’. Most commonly, the speed of hot-spots is reduced unless you have a Premium Unlimited plan, or have a limited (few hundred meg to a few gigs) of high speed data on a hotspot before it is reduced.
Based on your stated usage @Northern_Piper, it won’t be much of an issue, but it could be. Especially since some sites, even primarily text based, will time out if the speed of your connection is less than it expects.
To give a concrete example, my old T-Mobile plan has ‘unlimited’ hotspot usage, but at 3G capped speeds. Works… okay, for text based usage, not so much for other things. I have a promo that gives each line 10G of 4g/LTE speeds and then it drops back to 3G, but that was a per-line addon.
Current “Essential” plans do the unlimited 3G, or the various premium plans have 50G of the highspeed hotspot data. So, again, check. 