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Wifi tethering but sharing existing wifi connection?

jades1

Lurker
Jul 7, 2012
2
0
Hi
I've been researching on this for the longest time but never found any solution
To make a long story short, I'm trying to share an existing wifi connection with one of those tethering apps out there. It worked on my ipad and iphone at one point with pdanet, and now I'm trying to get it working on my Samsung galaxy s2 skyrocket running 2.3.6. Pdanet redirects me to foxfi, and whenever I turn on wifi hotspot it immediately disconnects the wifi network I'm connected to and shares my 3G AT&T connection

Is there a way to accomplish what I am asking for?

My phone is not currently rooted, but I don't mind rooting it if necessary

Thanks in advance
 
This may be a limitation in the particular radio in the phone. There is a radio dedicated to WiFi that is separate from the radio on the phone 3G/4G carrier circuit.

I see why you would want to do this. For example, you want to share a WPA protected wifi hotspot with another device that isn't encryption capable.

I cannot say definitively, however, I suspect this is a hardware limitation with many Android devices. That's not to say that there isn't an Android device with a higher end WiFi radio and driver set that allows for what you are trying to accomplish. Yet, understanding what is taking place lends itself to better understanding the limitation.

Consider: Think of your Android's WiFi radio in how it is being allocated for the moment. It can be told "connect to an access point" so that is what it does, and it is busy doing just that. If you tell it, "be an access point" then it cannot continue to connect to another access point, because it will have to disconnect so it can become an access point itself, and thus be busy acting as an access point. So the device would have to have dual WiFi radios, so one could be dedicated to connecting to an AP, while the other is busy acting as an AP. Now, in the computer world there are some single radio devices now that do fast mode switching, back and forth, supported by a more complex driver set and having a fast radio chipset, however, they _always_ suffer from performance loss, always. EnGenius makes such a device, and in the user guide it explains how throughput is divided when configured to operate as a repeater.

It is interesting that your iPad could do this, suggesting that it has dual WiFi radios internally for WiFi. Was it broadcom?
 
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Thanks for your detailed response. Very helpful

As for the ipad - the last time I ever tried it was with a jailbroken iPad 2 with pdanet
I do remember a mywi update for the iPad and iPhone that was released in April which allowed you to share an existing wifi connection

Thanks again
 
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Did you encounter issues with sharing Wifi via tethering? I have a Samsung Galaxy S 3 with the same current software version of ice cream sandwich. I recently encountered problems with the Wifi sharing via tethering wherein suddenly the client gets disconnected and when I try to reconnect it cannot get an IP Address. I tried isolating to the client, which I am using an iphone 4 (also with the latest software version, not jail broken. I suspect it was the launcher which I recently installed which was causing this problems.
 
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