How to set your phone up as a personal hotspot (or tether your mobile phone)

Browsing the internet on your mobile phone is great, isn’t it? But for the privilege, most of us pay a monthly fee, or have to purchase some amount of access time on a Pay and You Go package to make it cost effective.

Then there’s the broadband at home, and you might even have a broadband dongle that you carry around with you if you need internet connection while you’re on the move.

That’s where tethering comes in. Tethering is basically sharing your mobile phone’s internet connection with other devices (your laptop for example) so they can pick up and use its internet connection. It’s not a new phenomenon – those tecchy mums out there who are reading this will remember doing it when smartphones first came out some years ago…with a very slow connection.

Fast forward to 2011, and mist mobile networks are charging its customers for using the same internet connection that they use to browse on their phones (i.e. using your mobile phone as a personal hotspot). It probably sounds very bizarre and, quite frankly, it is. No wonder, then, that the Three network decided not to charge anything extra for tethering your mobile phone.

Three’s One Plan with includes tethering, so there’s no extra cost for using your mobile phone as a personal hotspot.

Three recently told Macworld magazine: “On The One Plan Three gives customers all-you-eat-data, which includes allowing them to use their phone as a modem for tethering, so customers on The One Plan are free to use the personal hotspot feature as they like without incurring any additional charges.

“Customers on other tariffs or on Pay as You Go will have the data use from the personal hotspot feature deducted from their allowance as they would any other data use. The best value option in this case is to buy a mobile internet add on.”

If you want to find out more about how to tether your mobile phone, visit Three’s blog post.

How to tether your smartphone (turn it into a hotspot).

1. Go to Settings.

2. Select General

3. Select Network

4. Select ‘Set Up Personal Hotspot’

If you are with another network other than Three, you will get a message asking you to contact your mobile network provider. This is because you will have to add this function onto your price plan, which will be an additional cost.

If you are with the Three network, or have tethering enabled on your price plan, follow the next steps:

5. Once you have selected ‘Set Up Personal Hotspot’, the next screen will ask you if you to choose form turning on ‘Wi-Fi and Bluetooth’ or ‘USB Only’. Select your preferred method of connecting the other devices to your personal hotspot.

6. Once you have made your selection, the name of your phone will become discoverable. If you chose Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, your iPhone will show you your Wi-Fi password, which you will use to connect your device to your iPhones internet connection.