Title is self explanatory. For background, I am currently running Asahi Linux on my M1 MBP. Whenever I connected the hotspot without data being turned on, it somehow still worked like any regular wifi. I even ran several updates in the system and downloaded multiple apps in this wifi, which I find it amusing. But out of curiosity, I wanted to know from you guys that what could the reason be for this.
EDIT: So after following the advice of jet@hackertalks.com, I relized that the hotspot is using the network of my University’s Wi-Fi, which explains why the hotspot worked even with the data turned off.
A hotspot is a connection where your phone creates a wifi network using its wifi antenna. The signal strength depends on how far away the phone is, thats it.
The hotspot stays on also if the phone has no cell data connection. Normally a phone should only be able to connect to either a wifi or be a hotspot, phone model is important.
Unrelated but what theme/color scheme are you using?
I am using the default Breeze Dark Theme, with colours from Sweet-Ambar-Blue.
Thanks!
Is the wifi enabled and connected on the phone? I had a situation once where the hotspot network was relaying data to the connected wifi network on the phone instead of mobile data like you’d expect.
That would be my guess as well.
Yeah my phone does this
Yeah, the Wi-Fi on my phone is enabled.
Do a traceroute and see which network it transits through
Ok, so after running traceroute, it seems that the hotspot is using the network of my university Wi-Fi, which my phone is connected with. EDIT: Thanks a lot! Forgot to thank you for the advice 😅
Which phone is that? I thought that most phones could not create a hotspot and at the same time connect to a WiFi network.
Most phones can, it’s just disabled in software, you can enable it in Androids developer settings.
Mine is a Motorola Edge 40.
It’s interesting on it’s own, since I do remember my android phone disconnecting from wifi when enabling the hotspot. If I understand it right, this type of wifi bridge requires two radios to work efficiently, but it may have changed in latest Wi-Fi standards. Curious nontheless.
This was my thinking as well, I did not know that there are phones that can be connected to a wifi network while hosting their own wifi network 🤔 On my iPhone, the only way to achieve Internet on pc while phone is on wifi, is to connect the phone via USB to the PC and share the internet connection this way.
Most androids can, samsung hides it behind a setting called “wifi bridge” and some hide it in dev settings but its almost always default off
Exactly, hence this post.
I’m guessing it uses the 2.4ghz antenna to transmit and the 5ghz antenna to receive or vice-versa
Is the phone essentially acting as a fancy Layer 3 extender?
No idea about that, tho even my old phone, which was Xiaomi 12T, could do that.
Is tethering overriding your data setting? If it was truly offline updates etc wouldn’t work
All the tethering settings are off. I’m just using the default hotspot settings.
So, you have a phone that does the tethering or something? Maybe, It’s some bug on its (or their, depending on how close you two are)? I’d try another device with the same hotspot.
Alternatively, the laptop may be connected to several networks at the same time and be using whatever works. Can probably be checked by verifying ips of the phone and the laptop.
So this same thing ocurred when my laptop was connected to the hotspot of my previous phone under a different name.
