Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
meganifica
Enthusiast - Level 1

After trial and error and NO help from Verizon, I've finally gotten it to work.

Here's what works for me:

Put the phone on a table next to the device you wish to connect to the personal hotspot.

Go into Settings.

Set Airplane Mode to off.

Set Wifi to not connected.

Set Bluetooth to off.

Don't do anything to the Personal Hotspot setting you see underneath the Bluetooth setting thing.

Instead, go into General. Go to Cellular. Go to Personal Hotspot. If it's set to on, turn it off, wait five seconds, then turn it on. If it's off, turn it on.

Within another five seconds, you should the iphone listed among your wireless choices on your computer, Kindle, or whatever.

Leave the settings as indicated above (let well enough alone, let sleeping dogs lie, if it ain't broke don't fix it, etc.!), even if you don't wish to connect at that time.

If you come back later and want to connect, go into General. Go to Cellular. Go to Personal Hotspot. It will still be set to on from the last time; turn it off, wait five seconds, then turn it on.

This is now working for me flawlessly (knock wood!). I want to give a HUGE thank you and shout out to . . . MYSELF for figuring this out through many HOURS of trial and error when Verizon was useless. LOL!

Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
HellyH
Enthusiast - Level 1

Thank you so much!!

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Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
ThomBob
Newbie

I too am having issues with the hotspot feature.

I have tried turning it off, back on so forth, so on, etc. and nothing works reliably.

Pretty frustrating.

Before you ask, IOS 6.1 (10B143)

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Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
LuvToGoFast
Newbie

You are a genius!

I even made Verizon give me a new phone because of this issue!!!

Thank you!!

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Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
Bajaberta
Enthusiast - Level 1

Thank you so much!!

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Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
mkaiserco
Newbie

One of your steps says to set Wi-Fi to "not connected".  You don't mean turn it off, do you?  I assume you mean Wi-Fi should be on, but not connected to any router.  How do you keep it from connecting to one of your memorized hotspots?

Thanks.

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Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
vzw_customer_support
Customer Service Rep

Dear mkaiserco,

Good morning. I am sorry to learn of the confusion from the directions listed above. I would like to thank meganifica for providing great steps and helping the community.

When meganifica advised to ensure Wi-Fi is set to not connected, this means it should be disabled. By turning off Wi-Fi it will also ensure your device does not auto connect to a memorized hotspot but only to the pesonal hotspot on the device itself. I hope this helps with any confusion there may have been. Should you have further questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us. Have a wonderful day!


Thank You,
Michelle_VZW
Please follow us on twitter @VZWSupport

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Re: How to use iPhone 5 Personal Hotspot?
Humie1
Newbie

This worked for me and THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!! (really)

I realize now that I had accidentally done the above a couple of times, then couldn't replicate. Now I can.

I've also spent hours trying to get this to work.

I Finally got USB tethering internet access to work by downloading iTunes (and four other intrusive programs that automatically installed themselves when I did that.) That got me the drivers I needed for USB to work, but the iPhone still did not show up in my wifi list on my laptop (a PC, not a Mac, by the way, which I think must be part of the issue, but not sure.) I'm also dong this in iOS 7, so these problems have been in iOS for a while.

This is both a serious design problem and a defect problem The design problems are that Apple's hotspot model conflates and interconnects the USB, Wifi, and Bluetooth functionality confusingly and unecessarily; and they separated SSID setup from the personal hotspot set up, another departure from the "norms" that exist in other operating systems and platforms. The defect is that the personal hotspot function, which should perform identically from wherever it is called, behaves differently when called from the "Cellular" command than from the "General" settings command.

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