One of the great features of Android devices is the ability to enable your phone to be a mobile Wi-Fi router. With today’s LTE speeds, a portable hotspot from your device can be quite useful for anything from playing on Xbox Live, doing homework on a laptop, or just plain sharing your phones high-speed internet with your less-fortunate friends. Here’s how to enable it on Android Lollipop.

First things first, go to your device settings, you will see a screen like the screenshot above. There will be Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Data usage, and more options. Press the more options.

 

On the next screen you will see the fifth option down from the top, which is ‘Tethering & portable hotspot”. Press that and you are almost ready to boot up your own portable hotspot.

 

Now, all you have to do to boot up your portable hotspot is to enable the option that says “Portable Wi-Fi hotspot”. Once this is enabled you Wi-Fi is up and ready to be used by other devices. Although your Wi-Fi is enabled, it gives you a default Wi-Fi name titled “AndroidAP”, a randomized password, and the default WPA2 PSK security type.

 

Once you are on this screen, you can then customize your network name to anything of your choosing. The same goes for the password, although it is required to be at least 8 characters long. As far as security goes, it is either open for all or WPA2 PSK security.

That’s it for this edition of Android Lollipop tips from Phone Probe, be sure to let us know if this is something useful you’d like us to continue doing. Be sure to share and comment!