How to Enable the “Sometimes Hidden” Personal Hotspot in an iPhone
Find out how some carriers make you do some extra work to enable Personal Hotspot in iPhone
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After about one and a half years of being an iOS Developer, in November 2020, I could finally muster courage to invest my savings on an iPhone. Hence, after months of in-depth research and feasibility study (credit goes to my involvement in technical field for that habit of using jargons 😂), I got myself an iPhone SE 2020. And till now, I have nothing to complain about it except for its battery life — it could have been better!
One day, I was travelling with my friends and I decided to use the Personal Hotspot feature of my iPhone to share my mobile data with friends but sadly, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Like what we developers and programmers always do, I performed a Google search to find that the feature would only be displayed only if my carrier supported it. That confused me since the hotspot feature worked perfectly fine on Android devices with my carrier — Nepal Telecom. At that time, my network settings looked like the screen recording given below:
In the screen recording shown above, you can see that I’ve set the APN of Cellular Data and LTE Setup (Optional) to ntnet. I’ve left Username and Password fields blank since Nepal Telecom doesn’t use them.
So, I decided to do an experiment by feeding my phone a SIM card of another carrier — Ncell. As soon as I fed that SIM card, Personal Hotspot was shown in Settings.
The weird thing was that I hadn’t even touched any network settings at that time. Again, when a Nepal Telecom SIM card was inserted, Personal Hotspot was nowhere to be found.
