as prolific as free wi-fi has gotten it seems like
somehow when you most need it it's not
available or maybe the problem is that you just often find yourself needing to
use your laptop out in the middle of nowhere
fortunately most smartphones and cellular-enabled tablets these days
support tethering and no
i'm not talking about that dorky holster that came with your phone case
tethering is the act of routing your phone or tablet's cellular data
connection to another device such as a
laptop tethering can be accomplished via a usb cable or even wirelessly which
effectively turns your phone into a personal wi-fi hotspot
so then how do you make this happen well assuming you've got a strong cellular
signal you can enable tethering on iOS
simply by going into the settings app and enabling the personal hotspot option
on Android you'll go to the wireless and network settings tap more and find
tethering and portable hotspot if you're tethering with usb you might
need to connect your cable before some of the relevant options will become
available but if you're using wi-fi a bit of additional setup is still
required just like a home router you'll need to enter a name or ssid for your
hotspot so your computer will know what the heck to connect to and optionally a
password though i would definitely recommend doing this and securing your
connection preferably with wpa2 security
if you don't anyone in range can use your hotspot so they could run up your
data bill or even potentially see what
it is that you're doing you can also tether via bluetooth but
due to its low maximum speed i'd recommend against it unless you have no
other choice for some reason once you've followed these steps and
connected to your hotspot on your second device via the usual process you're
pretty much good to go but tethering does come with a few
caveats the most obvious being that you're going to be limited by how fast
your cellular network is and although lte connections that can get to 100
megabits per second or more are becoming commonplace these days your real speed
might top out far below what you're used to at home if you aren't getting an
optimal signal you also might be fighting data limits
imposed by your mobile provider even carriers that promise unlimited
everything sometimes have a separate cap for
tethering and or they severely throttle your speed once you use a certain amount
of data often much lower than what your home isp allows
and this assumes that your cellular plan
even allows tethering at all if you bought your phone directly from a
carrier they may have hidden away the tethering options or even gone as far as
to disable them outright unless you pay
a monthly fee so be sure to check the fine print whenever you sign up for a
mobile plan although some resourceful users have found ways around carrier
restrictions by jailbreaking or rooting their phones which you can learn more
about up here or even installing special
apps that hide exactly how much data is being consumed from tethering from their
providers this particular practice caught the ire
of t-mobile back in 2015 when some users
were found to be consuming as much as two terabytes of data per month
but even if you do have a cell plan that doesn't place onerous restrictions on
tethering you may want to pick up a portable battery bank if you're planning
to tether for any lengthy period of time as pushing all that data through your
phone can drain it quickly especially if you're doing it over Wi-Fi which requires
even more power to blast a wireless signal to your other devices which is
really inconvenient if you're stuck somewhere like fire festival and your
iphone is your only conduit to the outside world
speaking of conduits to the outside world tunnelbear vpn lets you tunnel
through up to 20 different countries allowing you to browse the internet and
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a chrome extension and all you got to do is just choose a country in the app
press like one button and watch as your
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address gets switched so you show up as
if you are in that other country they
also have a top-rated privacy policy and do not log user activity so if you're
looking to keep your internet connection private you can try out tunnelbear vpn
with 500 megs of free data and no credit card required at the link in the video
description then when you upgrade to unlimited data you can save 10 percent
by going to tunnelbear.com Linus
so thanks for watching guys if you like the video well you can do that and if you disliked
it well you can do that and if you want
to check out our other channels we've got links to those if you want to leave a comment with a video suggestion you
can do that and if you want to subscribe well hey here's a big internet hug for
you oh that was kind of long that was that
wasn't really a just friend's hug was it