How do I troubleshoot personal hotspot mode failing to issue IP addresses?
This one drove me nuts but I believe this will work for most of you:
Basically the APN settings for the Hotspot were missing.
If you can browse the internet on your phone and you can activate your Hotspot but you get the yellow exclamation mark on the computer's wifi or the 'Network cable unplugged" with USB tethering, try the following:
- Open Settings -> Mobile Data -> Mobile Data Network
- Check the APN/Username/Password settings under "Mobile Data" (most of the time username and password - if used - are identical, if not search APN settings on your provider's homepage)
- Enter the same settings under "Personal Hotspot" further down on the same settings page
- Return to Settings Menu
- Switch Mobile Hotspot off and on
- Connect to your Hotspot -> Internet on your computer should be working now
The problem appeared for me while roaming/after changing sims, basically every time the network settings get reconfigured and the APN settings automatically change for the roaming network/new network.
Hope it works for you too!
Found it! I went to a MetroPCS store and they looked at the phone. They enabled hotspot for my account, but it still would not help. They gave me a phone number to call, I called tech support, and was told:
- Turn off LTE. Settings > Cellular > Enable LTE (Off)
- Turn off/on Personal Hotspot.
Now it works! It only works on 4G.
I don't know if having the hotspot feature ($5/m) enabled on your account is relevant or not. I thought all data was combined, and since it is an unlocked phone, how could they know?
i had the same problem earlier on and it was soo frustrating!
Anyway i got it fixed (posting here using my revived laptop!) and the following was what worked for me:
Start > Control Panel > Windows Firewall > Allow a program or feature > remove Bonjour > reboot computer and watch the magic unfold.
P.S This was a solution posted by kind humans in another forum but it took me long to find it..Just thought i could share it on this forum as well to hopefully make the search easier for others.
cheers, hope this would solve your problem too! :)
I am going to take some time to do a summary of networking and troubleshooting to try to help you out.
When your phone is running a Personal Hotspot it starts up a couple services on the phone's OS one being a DHCP service. DHCP might seem familiar two you because it is what is the part of every network that gives out the IP address.
A network has two sides to it, internal and external. In our modern day there are external IPs that look like this 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334 and internal IPs that look like this: 127.0.0.1 or maybe you have seen 192.168.1.1
If you see a IP address on your computer(s) with 169.... this usually means that the DHCP service is not reachable. This could have several reasons and in this case I am going to assume that your Windows computer does not have the correct driver to speak with the iPhone's DHCP service. If you connect your iPhone via USB the driver is different than Bluetooth or WiFi.
We should be able to assume that the iPhone's network is fine if you can surf the web on your iPhone. Now getting that network over to your Windows computer is a matter of connecting the iPhone via USB (or WiFi or Bluetooth) and making sure that the driver is installed correctly. This should be the case as long as you have the latest version of iTunes installed on the computer and the iPhone shows up in iTunes as an available device.
The error message you get of "Connection in limited" is to my understanding the Windows version of "self-assigned IP address" which results from the computer not understanding the DHCP and/or DNS settings from the device it is getting network activity from.
Please verify all of these things and if you notice anything else out of the ordinary and I'll update my guide to help more.
I had this same issue. Turns out that when traveling to another country and using a SIM card, I was required to enable a profile on my iPhone. This profile set the APN, which in turn was blocking me from tethering. To check on your iPhone, this go to:
Settings app → Cellular → Cellular Data Options → Cellular Data Network
In my case, the APN was pointed at the network in the country I had used the SIM card in. Even with this APN I was still able to use my phone on my current network with little troubles, but I was not able to tether.
If you see that the APN settings are wrong, and resetting them does not work (my profile prevented them from being reset), go to:
Settings app → General → Profile (if this does not exist, then you don't have any profiles installed). Delete the profile you do not need and this may solve your problem.