Why can iPhones share cellular data but not their wifi?
In: Technology
Why would you need to share wifi? Doesn’t your computer or tablet have its own wifi card?
The cellular data is shared over a wifi connection. This blocks all other wifi connectivity because the wifi chip isn’t advanced enough to handle multiple simultaneous connections.
Necessity.
If you need data and have a wifi capable device, just hook into the wifi. The capability is there for when you don’t have mobile data available but someone else does.
Not sure if it is really like this, so take the explanation with a small grain of salt.
The phone has only one Wifi antenna and chip. That chip can be used to connect a wifi (for example in your house). Now, that same chip (and antenna) can be switched to “access point” mode. Then other wifi antennas (on other phones) can connect to it. Due to technical reasons same antenna and chip cannot be simultaneously in access point mode and connected to an external wifi (your home wifi). The mobile network is different chip and antenna so it can be connected to the internet and that connection is shared through the wifi antenna and chip that are in “access point” mode.
Because there’s no point in sharing a WiFi connection from one iPhone to another. If one of the iPhones is connected to a router then the 2nd iPhone should have no problem in connecting to the same router. Why tether the WiFi connection through an iPhone when you can connect your iPhone directly to the same WiFi router? Cellular data means that one of the iPhones is directly connected to the internet via the mobile network but the 2nd iPhone maybe ran out of data or his carrier doesn’t have strong signal in the area so you share the data connection.
I don’t understand this question. Maybe it’s me but it seems pretty stupid. When an iPhone shares its data it’s creating its own Wi-Fi network. When an iPhone is connected to a Wi-Fi network there is no need to share it as the other phone can just connect to the same network.
Because Apple has decided not to implement the feature.
There are many phones that can do this, dating back to 10+ years ago. I used to use the feature or my Galaxy s7 often to share hotel wifi with my laptop as many hotels at the time only allowed a single device per room to connect. Before that, I’d often do the same with my Windows laptop.
iPhones cannot do it because due to security, hardware, usability, cost, or lack of interest – Apple has decided not to implement it in the operating system. Probably most likely, they decided the feature would be very rarely used and may confuse users.
It’s not a technical restriction, they just didn’t implement the feature. It’s not a common use case, honestly. Why doesn’t the second person just get on the WiFi? I can imagine situations where I would want to do this but it’s usually some form of shenanigans (for instance, one person pays for WiFi on plane and shares with everyone else).
The original 802.11 spec actually included designs for “ad hoc” networking, where data would be bounced between hosts until it reached one with an internet connection. This hasn’t seen much use since corporate interests decided it wasn’t in their interest to support.
A wifi chip can either be in “access point” mode (as in, a network you share) or in client mode (as in, it’s connected to another network). Because of the way wifi works, you can’t do both at the same time, unless you have more than one physical antenna, along with a chip to drive it and do the signal processing needed for the phone to decode the radio data. The reason sharing wifi-to-wifi is possible in some cases is because some devices have separate signal processing chips and separate antennas for the two commonly used wifi bands (2.4GHz and 5GHz). To share wifi in this situation, you use one wifi chip one as a network you share, and the other as a client on another network which it uses to get access to the internet.
Why would a phone need to share a WiFi connection to another device over WiFi? Can you describe a situation where the phone is on WiFi but another device can’t access that WiFi network? It doesn’t seem useful, unless you are trying to use a phone as a WiFi repeater, which is not a good use of a phone.
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