Sunday, December 29, 2013

Connecting your Android phone to your Windows WiFi HotSpot

Now this actually something I thought would be a piece of cake, until the day I actually wanted to do it.

This is how I tried:

I went to 'Network and Sharing Center' and selected 'Set up a Connection or Network' and clicked on 'Set up a wireless ad hoc (computer-to-computer) network'.


Then gave the following details.



Windows said my network is ready to use but it was not showing up on my Android phone.

Googled a bit, and got the bad news. Android does not support WiFi ad hoc networks! Well at least if your phone is not rooted. In my case I was trying with a Nexus running Vanilla Android. Doh!

Again, Google to the rescue. I found out that we can use 'netsh' administrative commands to host a wireless network in the access point mode instead of the ad hoc mode.

So on an administrative command prompt, you type:
netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=MyAdHocNetwork
key=12345678



Then you start it:
netsh wlan start hostednetwork



Now you will see 'MyAdHocNetwork' in your Android phone's WiFi networks list!

PS: Later I found out this can be done with ease using 'Virtual Router Plus', but it doesn't hurt to get a little grease under the nails once in a while :)

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