{"id":5866,"date":"2013-06-05T11:30:18","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T01:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/?p=5866"},"modified":"2013-06-06T00:03:40","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T14:03:40","slug":"sharing-wi-fi-via-your-microsoft-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/sharing-wi-fi-via-your-microsoft-surface\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharing Wi-Fi Via Your Microsoft Surface"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the biggest gripes that people may have is the lack of 3G\/4G\/LTE connectivity on both versions of\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Anyway, how do you enable this functionality?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Open an administrative command prompt<\/a>,<\/li>\n
  2. Type in netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=”MySSID” key=”Mykey” keyUsage=persistent<\/strong> where MySSID<\/strong> is the name of the new Wi-Fi network you want to create and Mykey<\/strong> is the password for the new Wi-Fi network shared from your tablet,<\/li>\n
  3. Hit Enter,<\/li>\n
  4. Start the new virtual network card by typing netsh wlan start hostednetwork<\/strong> which should then make a new virtual adapter appear in your network interface list,<\/li>\n
  5. Go into Network and Sharing Center<\/strong> 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\u00a0WiFi (SSID)<\/strong> – in my case this says WiFi (Swissotel)<\/strong> but yours will obviously be different but click on that link,<\/li>\n
  6. Click the Properties<\/strong> button in the bottom left corner of the new window,<\/li>\n
  7. Click the Sharing<\/strong> tab,<\/li>\n
  8. Tick Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection<\/strong>,<\/li>\n
  9. Click OK<\/strong>,<\/li>\n
  10. Click Close<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One of the biggest gripes that people may have is the lack of 3G\/4G\/LTE connectivity on both versions of\u00a0the 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 … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,133,18,134,79],"tags":[2246,1992,2068,562,2278,2361,2372],"class_list":["post-5866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-connectivity","category-mobile","category-technology","category-wifi","category-wireless","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-surface","tag-virtual","tag-wi-fi","tag-windows-7","tag-windows-8","tag-windows-rt","item-wrap"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Wi-Fi-Logo.png?fit=256%2C254&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}