I have set it up, and gotten it to work quite nicely. Except when I leave the house. I have gone a few different areas, and while the phone and the Ipad maintain a high signal, the 4g keeps dropping, and coming back, and leaving again. The phone can be used to browse the web by itself but the tiny print and lack of familiarity keep me from using it for anything other than a YouTube video. It isn’t nice to read the dope. It can take several minutes for the Straight Dope to load one page, if it doesn’t just time out.
I can bring the whole kit an kaboodle home, shut off the phone, take out the battery, then restart the phone, turn on the hotspot and it works fine inside the house. With no bars. In the middle of the park, it just sits there saying Connected, and not doing anything.
So my Google Fooey is very weak, Even the cat can’t help. Maybe someone here knows if this is a problem I can fix. Settings are wrong etc. although, I do remember it working pretty good before the android update that snuck up on me. I went out in the yard and used the ipad and also logged on with a laptop.
Phone: Samsung Galaxy s3
Provider: Verizon
Tablet: Ipad 2 (Wireless capable, not 4g capable)
I am not sure if I am connecting through blue tooth, although I can say definitively I did not set up any blue tooth settings.
First, does your network provider/contract allow hotspot use - my understanding is that some mobile network contracts in the US do not allow this, and actively block such hotspot traffic.
Are you paying for the Hot Spot service? Do you have a wifi network at your house? Is it possible that you are actually connecting to the wifi at your house? And when you leave the house, the reason your phone keeps cutting out is because you have not added the Hot Spot service to your data plan. For T-Moble it is like an extra $15 per month. I can’t imagine Verizon would give it away free.
I am a Verizon customer and they charge me for hotspot use. If I am not subscribed the phone won’t even let me turn on hotspot mode. However, see post #6 in this thread for lots more info on this specific to Verizon’s 4G service. Apparently Verizon is required by the FTC to allow customers to use apps that provide hotspot service for free, although you do have to have a data plan for the phone. In my case, my phone (HTC Thunderbolt) is configured to disallow such applications.
I’m not sure I understand the problem. If the 4G keeps dropping, how are you able to browse the web? Are you saying even when the phone is able to connect to the internet, the hotspot doesn’t work? And your tablet is connecting to the phone in exactly the same way as at home?
On the phone, is the tablet listed as one of the connected devices? Does the tablet show an active wifi connection to the phone?
Yes, I do pay the subscription fee. Hotspot and Normal connection to a wireless router at the same time is not allowed by the phone. So the phone is the hotspot and the ipad is connected to it.
According to the screen, the device connection screen shows one device connected to the hot spot provided by the phone, cell signal at full bars, but the symbol for 4G lte signal, keeps disappearing, pops back up and shows some activity, then disappears again. Ipad waits patiently until the webpage not available error comes up.
When it worked on the very first test webpages might have been a little slow, but I could watch an entire YouTube video around 3 minutes without lagging and buffering. ( I expect some problems, but currently it is unusable.)
Added info: I just watched a one minute YouTube video, on the ipad through the phone, worked perfectly, and I had unplugged my home router. Even if the phone could sneak in and use the signal it wasn’t there.
4G symbol steady, device connection steady with one device, bars 1-2 bars.