How to connect your PC to the Internet using your phone’s cellular data

Rick's Daily Tech Tips is a great resource!

Last summer while Brian was not finding diamonds in Crater of Diamonds State Park, I was back at the Airbnb getting the News out.  I knew the internet might be sketchy but I didn't realize how sketchy.  Quickly I switched to using my iPhone as a hot spot.  It worked beautifully.  By that evening I was out of data and have since switched to an unlimited plan.  Mind you, I was on the internet pretty much all day before this happened and what I was doing involved a lot of uploading.  That being said this is a great feature when your internet service is down and you can get cell service.
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Does your Internet service occasionally go out due to storms or equipment failure?
If so, you know how irritating it can be when you have to wait for a tech to come out and restore your service.

But guess what? In a pinch, you can use your smartphone’s cellular data connection to access the Internet with your computer. 

Both Android phones and iPhones have a feature called tethering that allows you to essentially use your phone as a modem and your cellular provider as an ISP for your computer(s) and other devices.

Not all cellular data plans allow you to set up a tethered Wi-Fi connection with your phone, but if yours doesn’t you can probably add that option to your plan for a reasonble amount.

Once you have confirmed that your plan indeed supports tethering, simply follow the steps below to set up a tethered Wi-Fi hotspot with your phone. Just follow the procedure that matches the device you have.
If you have an Android phone:
1 – Tap the Settings icon (it looks like a “gear“).
2 – Tap Network & Internet.
3 – Tap Advanced.
4 – Tap Hotspot & tethering.
5 – Tap Wi-Fi hotspot.
6 – Toggle the setting to On.
7 – Use the settings on the current screen to assign your hotspot a name and password.

If you have an iPhone:
1 – Tap the Settings icon (it looks like a “gear“).
2 – Tap Cellular.
3 – Tap Personal Hotspot or Settings.
4 – Tap Personal Hotspot.
5 – If it isn’t on already, toggle the “Allow others to Join” setting to On.
6 – Choose a password for the new hotspot.
That’s all there is to it. You should now be able to connect your computer (and other devices) to the Internet via the Wi-Fi hotspot you just created. Simply connect to that network and enter the password.

There’s a huge caveat I should mention at this point…
If you have a cellular data plan with a data cap, using a desktop browser that loads the full versions of websites instead of the mobile versions can potentially burn through your monthly data allotment in a hurry.

Of course this won’t be an issue if you have an unlimited data plan that’s truly unlimited (with no data cap or high-speed threshold), but not all “unlimited” plans are truly unlimited.

Some “unlimited” plans will throttle your download speeds back into dial-up range after you’ve reached a certain data threshold. As you can imagine, that greatly impacts the user experience (no more streaming and very slow page loads, for example).
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Just something to be aware of before you start using your phone’s cellular data to connect your computer to the web.