Why can iPhones share cellular data but not their wifi?
In: Technology
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.
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