Using the phone's hotspot to share WiFi

[agape01]

My family was on the Spectrum of the Seas on a 5 night cruise from Singapore to Phuket.

Apparently, I was told that the WiFi service I had paid for would only allow access to that one device and I wouldn't be able to hotspot my WiFi access to other devices.

Just wondering whether is this the case happening on other RCL ships?

[not-enough-cruising]

Most phones can’t hotspot WiFi, only cellular data streams. 

[twangster]

Policy says no sharing but some folks with certain Android models claim it works.   

[Scottdalfonso]

hotspot is a cellular thing, not a wifi thing so you'll still get charged major cell roaming charges for this. SOME phones, like Androids, do have a tethering option where you can share wifi between devices, but not sure how well it works with the ships wifi. 

[Biker19]

45 minutes ago, agape01 said:

Just wondering whether is this the case happening on other RCL ships?

What a phone can do, and the policy are two different things. The policy is the same fleetwide - you are not supposed to share a one device package to multiple devices at the same time. Folks do it all the time with travel routers, phones that support it, laptops,,etc.

[RobInMN]

Yes, policy says no, but some phones are capable.

From what I understand, iPhones are a no.

We use Samsung Galaxy phones. We can do this. And while it may technically be categorized as "Tethering", it's still using the "Mobile Hotspot" functionality to do it.

We have done this on cruises over the last few years, ever since we started taking a Firestick with us when travelling. We've done it on 5 RCL cruises, and 2 river cruises with 2 different companies. It works just fine. I want to say that in a previous version of the software or maybe it was a Sprint thing (which is now T-Mobile), you could turn on the Mobile Hotspot even with Airplane mode on. Can't do that now, so not sure if it's necessary or not, but when I turn on the Mobile Hotspot on my phone, I turn off Mobile Data to force it to use the WIFI connection.

The advantages are that we have the firestick pre-setup to use the hotspot from either of our phones. All we have to do is turn on the hotspot and plug the Firestick in. It will auto-connect. We don't' have to screw around with the Firestick web browser or do cursor typing every single time we want to use the Firestick.

The other thing it's nice for is that I can stream music or a podcast from my phone, while using my tablet to play a game.

We also only do this when we specifically want it. We don't leave it on all the time.

 

[Lane Hog]

People with iPhones say it can't be done because Apple products are incapable of dual wifi.

Those of us with Samsung and other Andriod devices know it can be done. 

My S20's hotspot SSID is set to broadcast the same name and password as our house's SSID.  Once I'm on Voom, everyone else's device connects thru mine just fine. There's really no way to block it -- the Voom router only sees packets coming from the same MAC and IP address for the radio that is logged into Voom. The phone knows which device the return packets get routed back to.