I so often find myself, while I’m out and about or travelling, having no Wi-Fi signal but having plenty of 4G or 5G on my phone. Well, there’s a way we can actually share the mobile data between our devices to convert it into Wi-Fi on other phones, tablets, and laptops. And it’s called Personal Hotspot. I’ll show you how it works, how to turn it on, and then how to connect to it from another device. But don’t panic, it’s really simple.

And if you’re new around here, then hi, my name is Jacob. I’m your friendly Apple expert here to help you make the most of your iPhone and iPad. Please do press subscribe so you won’t miss any QuickTips in the future.

Okay, so on my main phone here, I’ve currently got a good 5G service. I’m going to go into the Settings app, and I’m going to tap onto Personal Hotspot near the top. Now, at the moment, it’s turned off, and you can see underneath there’s a Wi-Fi password there as well. I can tap in here and change this, and basically the other person will type in that password to connect to your phone. So, try and make it something easy to type in for someone, but not easy to guess, if that makes sense.

Now I’m going to turn Personal Hotspot on by selecting Allow Others to Join. And now, on my laptop here, if I go onto the Wi-Fi settings in the corner, I’m going to see Jacob’s iPhone coming up as a Wi-Fi network. Now, my laptop is currently offline, there’s no internet connectivity at all. But if I tap onto Jacob’s iPhone and type in that password, I’ve now got a new symbol at the top, kind of like two interlocking circles, and I’m now connected. I can browse the internet, I can check emails, I can even upload videos, and it’s using the data from my phone, wirelessly connecting to my laptop.

This works phone to phone as well. And if you’re finding it’s not as quick as you need it to be, you can plug in via USB-C cable between the two devices, and that will help as well.

One last thing before you go, though: if you scroll down to the bottom of this screen, there’s a Data Usage section, and you can see which devices have connected to your phone and how much data they’ve been using. It is worth keeping an eye on this, especially if you’re on a limited contract, you’ve got a certain amount of gigabytes of data per month, you don’t want to accidentally use too much. So, just be mindful of that.

Okay, that’s Personal Hotspot. I hope you found it useful. And if you did, I think you’re going to really enjoy this QuickTip next.