We will not always have the best connection in the world in our homes, luckily, if you have an old mobile at home, it is time to dust it off and use it to improve the Wi-Fi coverage of your router. Although it will not be the simplest thing in the world, the truth is that it will not be as complicated as we could have imagined at first.
To achieve this, we will transform a mobile device into a Wi-Fi repeater, and we will even have the possibility of acting as a Wi-Fi Bridge. However, the latter will largely depend on the software of our phone. In addition, one of the best news that we could give you is that any smartphone will work, that is, we will not need it to have specific hardware or to have root access. Therefore, these will be all the options that you will have available, and we will also explain what you should use it for and its possible disadvantages, since not everything will be benefits.
What to use it for
The main advantage of using a mobile phone is that we will be able to expand the wireless signal of the Wi-Fi connection that we want. That is, if the signal is weak at some point in our home, by configuring it as a repeater we can connect to it as if it were just another router.
Although, it is not the only benefit for which we should use it, since it will not entail an extra cost for our pocket. As long as we have an old smartphone around our house. In addition, buying this section will not be cheap either.
At first it might have seemed useless to use it for this purpose, but if we know how to do it, the truth is that we will have great advantages. Of course, we must place it in a good location, since it will be useless to place it in a place in the house where the connection is fast.
Although it can not only be used for our home router, but also for certain connections, such as hotels or airports that only allow one device to be connected. So, by establishing the phone as a repeater, we could get to pair many more devices.
How to use
All mobile devices usually allow us the possibility of network anchoring , personal access point or Wi-Fi zone, that is, sharing our mobile data broadband connection via Wi-Fi with other devices, our phone acting as a point access of a wireless connection.
However, in other mobile devices we will also have the option of directly sharing the Wi-Fi network to which we are connected, our smartphone acting as if it were a repeater of the main wireless network. Therefore, we show you the different ways to configure a smartphone as a repeater of this wireless connection.
From your settings
We already warn you that in the case of the iPhone we will need to activate the mobile data yes or yes to be able to enable the Personal Access Point function. In addition, the negative side of iOS is that it will not directly use the wireless connection when any device is connected to our iPhone, but it will start using mobile data. So we will not be able to use a phone from the bitten apple to expand the coverage of our home router.
However, on Android phones we could have this possibility from its own settings. It will not only depend on the version of the smartphone’s operating system, but also on the personalization layer itself. Therefore, we must go to the settings of our phone> Connections and look for the option of Tethering , Wi-Fi Zone or Wi-Fi Bridge . The most common will be to have one of the first two options, since the last one is less common on mobile phones.
Once this option is activated, for example, we have done it with a Samsung mobile, we will have to establish both the network name (SSID) and the password. In fact, we will be able to perform this same configuration in cascade, that is, the phone will give us the steps to follow if it is the first time that we are going to configure it.
With an app
However, as we have already seen, not all phones today will let us share the wireless connection directly, so they will use the mobile data of the phone . Something unfeasible, since the advantage we want to take advantage of is to increase the Wi-Fi connection of the router. Therefore, to achieve our goal we must go to a third-party application.
In the case of Android we bring you the Wi-Fi Repeater app. In addition, we are facing a free software that we will find in the Google store, so we leave it in the following link:
After installing it, we must open it and grant it the permissions that it requests. Then, we will have to touch on the icon of the wireless connection. After this, we should see that, at the top, next to the icon, a QR code is displayed that we must use to connect another device. Although, if you cannot read these codes, you can always access them manually by entering the password below. However, you will have to change the Proxy section to manual. On the other hand, for iPhone phones there is no specific app that facilitates this.
Its disadvantages
If at the beginning we show you the different advantages of configuring a smartphone as a repeater of the router’s wireless connection, the truth is that we will also have a series of disadvantages.
One of the first that we can find when using your phone as a hotspot is the speed that it will give us, more than anything because it will be much slower than that of the router itself or a real repeater. So we would have a slow connection speed or low coverage.
Another of the cons is the high battery consumption, therefore, from the beginning we had already recommended you to use an old smartphone that you had at home, since being active 24 hours a day it will need to be connected to the electrical current as if it were one more router. Besides that you could only use it continuously for the same.