The issue only started happening in the past few weeks; I suspect it's the recent System Update G900VVRU2BOG5 (applied Aug 14, 2015).
Whenever I enable the phone to be used as a mobile hotspot, at which point it of course disables wi-fi, then when I turn the hotspot back off, wi-fi services no longer work, and I can not restore them without rebooting the phone.
Specifically, even though wifi is on (the wifi icon in the notifications screen is bright green), and it claims to connect to my home wi-fi, and shows the wi-fi bars, no apps successfully access the internet (Chrome says "DNS PROBE FINISHED: NO INTERNET"). All my other devices connected to the internet are of course continuing to function during this time, and turning wi-fi back off, waiting a few seconds, and turning it back on again, or trying to connect to alternative wi-fi access points, produces no results.
So far this has happened when (a) hotspot mode times out (due to no devices connecting to it for a while), (b) when I explicitly press the wi-fi icon in the notifications screen (and am then warned that hotspot mode will be turned off, and (c) when I go into the More Networks -> Hotspot screen and turn off the hotspot. In each case, I completely lose wi-fi access, and it does not return until I reboot the phone. I'm able to turn off wi-fi and use the 4G network for data access if need be, but clearly this isn't desirable if I want to keep my data usage down.
I have not tried to see if wi-fi somehow magically returns after an extended time; if it lasts more than several minutes I just reboot the phone (and of course, as the problem has consistently persisted, I don't generally wait any longer than it takes to confirm that wi-fi isn't working after turning off the hotspot).
I suspect that some of the state that must be set when turning hotspot mode on, in order to disable wi-fi during hotspot use, gets left permanently in that state and doesn't restore properly, leaving the device to believe at some levels that it's still in "hotspot" mode, even though in terms of presentation everything seems to understand it's back in wi-fi mode, and connected to the network: when it comes time to send/receive actual packets, something's going wrong.
Thanks for your attention!
-mjc
micahcowan,
We never want you to have issues using your hotspot or yoru wi-fi! These are both great features we want you to be able to rely on. Have we tried this with multiple wi-fi connections to see if it is the same? Have you tried manually turning the hotspot off before turning wi-fi back on to see if it will work then?
AndrewT_VZW
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As mentioned in the original post, yes, I've tried manually turning off the hotspot before turning the wi-fi back on, and have tried with multiple wi-fi access points. Though it's important to note that, even if turning off the hotspot manually worked, it would still continue to be a significant issue for me, because more often than not the hotspot times itself out if I've finished using it (or if my laptop goes to sleep).
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