Page 749 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

Tip

In the future, on the machine doing the broadcasting, you can start or stop the internet sharing by
clicking the Mobile Hotspot tile on the Action Center (“The Notifications List”).

On your laptop, choose your Surface’s name as you would any other Wi-Fi
hotspot. Presto: Your laptop is online.

Now, tethering eats up your tablet’s battery like crazy. So you probably

shouldn’t count on watching Netflix on your laptop via your tablet. But for
email, emergency web checks, and other mobile crises, tethering is a

convenient feature. And when you’re on the road for a couple of weeks, it’s
a heck of a lot cheaper than paying your hotel $13 a night for Wi-Fi.

Sharing an Ethernet Connection

You can use Mobile Hotspot for a totally different scenario, too: when one

computer has a wired Ethernet connection, and you’d like it to broadcast
that signal to nearby machines over Wi-Fi. (This, of course, assumes the

main computer also has Wi-Fi circuitry.) Your savings: one Wi-Fi router or
repeater.

The steps are the same as described already—except, of course, that for

“Share my Internet connection from,” you choose Ethernet.

Sharing a Wi-Fi Connection

Why would anyone want to use the Mobile Hotspot feature to share their
Wi-Fi internet connection with other computers—over Wi-Fi?

Here’s a good reason: so only one person has to pay for the hotel’s or
airport’s Wi-Fi. Other family members can slurp down a copy of that
connection without having to pay again and again.

This time, of course, you’d choose Wi-Fi from the “Share my Internet
connection from” drop-down menu.