How to Share Your Phone’s 5G Data With a Laptop, TV and Console at the Same Time

Home broadband is out, you have moved somewhere the line has not been installed yet, or you are working from a place that simply does not have fixed internet. Your phone has a fast 5G connection and a generous data allowance. The obvious move is to turn on its personal hotspot, and then you discover the limits: a handful of devices at most, a battery that drains in three hours, a phone that heats up, and a TV or console that either cannot see the network or refuses to work properly on it.

There is a better arrangement. Connect the phone to a Windows PC with a USB cable and let Connectify Hotspot, a free Windows app that turns a PC into a Wi-Fi hotspot, take that connection and rebroadcast it.

The phone charges over the cable instead of running its own Wi-Fi radio, and everything else joins the PC’s network, which sets no device limit of its own.

Why Not Just Use the Phone’s Own Hotspot?

For one laptop for an hour, the phone’s hotspot is fine. For a household, it runs into four things:

• Device limits. Most phones cap the personal hotspot at 5 to 10 devices, and some carriers set it lower.
• Battery and heat. A phone acting as a router for several devices runs hot and flat. Charging it while it does so makes the heat worse, and heat throttles the modem.
• Weak coverage. A phone’s Wi-Fi radio is designed to reach a pocket, not a house. Signal drops off fast a room away.
• Devices that will not cooperate. Consoles frequently report a restrictive NAT type on a phone hotspot, and smart TVs often cannot see a 5 GHz-only phone network.

Routing through a PC helps with the first three and with part of the fourth, because the PC has a mains supply, a better radio and far more control over the network it creates. The section on consoles below explains the part it cannot fix.

What You Need

• A 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 PC with a Wi-Fi adapter: any laptop, or a desktop with a USB Wi-Fi dongle. PCs with an ARM (Snapdragon) processor are not supported.
• A phone with a data plan that permits tethering. Most do; a few cheaper plans still charge extra or block it, so check before you rely on it.
• A USB cable. You can connect the phone over Wi-Fi instead, but USB is better here: it is more stable, and it charges the phone while it works.
• The Connectify Hotspot app installed on the PC. Sharing a USB-tethered phone works in Hotspot Lite, the free edition.

Worth saying plainly: this uses your mobile data allowance, and a household of devices gets through data far faster than a phone alone. Tethered data counts against your plan’s hotspot allowance whichever device does the sharing, so check what your plan includes. Streaming, cloud backup and game updates are where it goes.

6 Steps to Share Your Phone’s Data From a PC

The built-in Windows Mobile Hotspot can sometimes do this, but frequently will not offer a tethered phone as a shareable connection: it depends on the phone, the carrier and the driver, and there is no way to make it appear. Connectify Hotspot is not fussy about the source connection, so the steps below use it.

1. Download Connectify Hotspot and install it on the PC.
2. Plug the phone into the PC with a USB cable and turn on USB tethering: on Android it is under Settings → Network & internet → Hotspot & tethering; on iPhone, turn on Personal Hotspot and choose to trust the computer. Windows will add a new network connection.
3. Open Connectify Hotspot, choose Wi-Fi hotspot, and select the tethered phone under Internet to share.
4. Set a password and click Start hotspot. Devices join with the network name and password, or by scanning the QR code on the Hotspot screen.
5. In Settings, turn on Tell devices to save data. iPhones on the hotspot switch to Low Data Mode and Android phones treat it as a metered connection, so they hold off on large updates and photo backups.
6. If a smart TV or older device cannot see the network, it may only support 2.4 GHz. The hotspot’s band is chosen by Windows and your Wi-Fi adapter: the Wi-Fi channel row on the Hotspot screen shows which one you got, and some adapters let you prefer 2.4 GHz in Device Manager under the adapter’s Advanced properties.

Getting a Console Working Properly

A console behind a phone connection is two layers of address translation away from the internet: the PC’s and the carrier’s. That is what produces a strict NAT type and unreliable matchmaking. Connectify Hotspot’s gaming mode, free in every edition, handles the layer the PC adds: open Clients, select the console, and set Gaming mode to PlayStation Network, Xbox Live or Nintendo (or leave it on Detect automatically). Our guide to changing NAT type on a console covers what to expect.

Even then, be realistic: carriers use their own address translation on mobile networks, and no PC can open that layer, so some multiplayer titles will never be perfect over 5G. Downloads, streaming and single-player are unaffected.

Keeping the Data Bill Under Control

This is the part that catches people out. A few habits that help:

• Turn on Tell devices to save data in Connectify Hotspot, as in step 5.
• Set the network as metered on every Windows device that joins, which stops large automatic updates.
• Turn off automatic photo and cloud backup on phones and tablets while they are on this network.
• Drop streaming quality: the difference between 4K and 1080p is roughly three times the data for a screen most people cannot tell apart at normal viewing distance.
• Watch the per-device data figures on the Clients screen and find out which device is the problem before the allowance is gone, not after.

If you also have a wired connection available in some rooms, our guide on sharing a wired connection over Wi-Fi covers the cheaper option.

What Connectify Hotspot Adds When You Share Mobile Data

• It shares USB-tethered phones in every edition, and 4G/5G USB modems with PRO, which the Windows hotspot often refuses to list.
• No device limit of its own, so a household of phones, tablets, a TV and a console can fit if your Wi-Fi adapter allows it.
• Per-device data usage is shown clearly, and any device’s internet access can be switched off instantly, which matters a lot on a metered plan.
• Ad blocking across every connected device cuts real data, not just annoyance.
• Gaming mode for consoles, free in every edition.
• Hotspot Lite runs in timed sessions. For a connection the household uses all day, PRO removes the time limit.

Running a whole household on mobile data? Download Connectify Hotspot free and give every device a stable connection.