Sharing Wi-Fi Via Your Microsoft Surface

One of the biggest gripes that people may have is the lack of 3G/4G/LTE connectivity on both versions of the Microsoft Surface. Of course, on Surface Pro you can plug in a dongle and add such connectivity but it can become cumbersome to have a USB device protruding from the tablet or a dongle hanging off the side.

If you’re staying in a hotel then you may have access to Wi-Fi however some will charge you to access the Wi-Fi on a “per device” basis. Personally, I think this is a rort but there is a way around it using your Microsoft Surface tablet (or any other Windows RT or Windows 8 tablet for that matter.

You can actually connect your tablet to Wi-Fi and then share that connection over Wi-Fi. This may sound strange as typically you would associate one physical network interface with one network but Windows RT and Windows 8 include something called “Wi-Fi virtualisation”. This was actually added under Windows 7 but relied upon your Wi-Fi adapter supporting such capabilities. What this does is it overcomes the limitation of the one to one relationship between hardware and a network interface and presents two “virtual adapters” which then share the same physical hardware. It’s a little like how you can run numerous virtual machines on your computer simultaneously whilst only have one set of hardware (CPU, RAM, hard drive, etc). However, these Wi-Fi interfaces have to operate within the confines of one piece of hardware which means that your speeds may drop as a result.

Anyway, how do you enable this functionality?

1. Open an administrative command prompt,
2. Type in netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=”MySSID” key=”Mykey” keyUsage=persistent where MySSID is the name of the new Wi-Fi network you want to create and Mykey is the password for the new Wi-Fi network shared from your tablet,
3. Hit Enter,
4. Start the new virtual network card by typing netsh wlan start hostednetwork which should then make a new virtual adapter appear in your network interface list,
5. Go into Network and Sharing Center and click on the Wi-Fi network you want to share. It should list Access Type, HomeGroup and Connections. Next to connections will be the connection type and network name, something like WiFi (SSID) – in my case this says WiFi (Swissotel) but yours will obviously be different but click on that link,
6. Click the Properties button in the bottom left corner of the new window,
7. Click the Sharing tab,
8. Tick Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection,
9. Click OK,
10. Click Close.

On your other devices, you should be able to connect them to your new virtual Wi-Fi network which will the reroute traffic via the original Wi-Fi network to which your tablet was connected. However, non-Windows devices may not be able to automatically obtain an IP address (I’ve found that my Asus Google Nexus 7 has had issues) so you’ll need to hardcode an IP address and DNS address in order to get things going.

As it stands, I now have three other devices using the Wi-Fi network without forking out four times the amount – not bad I reckon! 🙂