Enabling hotspot in weak wireless signal area

[treebeard]

I found a senario that would benefit from a small change.

i brought my tablet computer on holiday with my ubuntu phone to a location with reasonable phone signal and a poor wireless signal with the intention of connecting my tablet to my phone hotspot.

I tried the wireless connection first but it was unusable.

then i hit the conudrum. in order to enable the (mobile data based) hotspot ubuntu touch requires wireless access (so that clients can connect to the phone hotspot) and offers to turn it on.

when wireless is turned on, clients connect as intended, but the phone also connects itsrlf to the available but unreliable wireless network rathet than relying only on the good mobile data signal.

So my suggestion is hotspot have separate settings for 1) enable wireless clients 2) enable wireless outbound

option 2 basically duplicates the existing wireless outbound connection checkbox in settings, so ideally only the first option is needed. when enabling wireless clients dont also enable wireless access to the outside world.

I think i worked round the issue using 'forget network' on tthe poor wireless connection.

[arubislander]

@treebeard it should already work the way you suggest. At least it does so on my Pixel 3a.

[AppLee]

Hi @treebeard
As Arubislander said when turning on the hotspot your phone now uses the WIFI chip as an AP an not as a client anymore.
So it should use the mobile data (3G, 4G, 5G) and it is really doubtful that it uses the WIFI network.

In order to serve as an AP and as a client at the same time, the device would need 2 chips and 2 antennas, one for reception, the other to emit.
What is probably your issue is that a phone acts as a bad AP and the antenna is not the best, plus the channel selection might not be the best and if the wifi chip is warming up it can also degrade the mobile data connection as well. The hardware is often not intended to be used this way even if the software allows it.

[treebeard]

@AppLee Thank you to yourself and @arubislander for replying.

I took another look the next morning and I can see it does what you say, making no attempt to connect wirelessly. I think there were a lot of variables to consider the previous evening and I gained the impression it was trying to use the poor outbound wireless connection.

I'm more sure now the mobile signal was also very poor and intermittent (it was a sea-front camp site). So I think the phone (Volla X23) did the best it could.