I think I was able to figure out what is going on and I think I have some recommendations for making this work more reliably. Prior to figuring this out, I was only able to keep a WiFi connection for 10 minutes. In an epic battle with my connection, I was able to observe that the BT on my phone established a temporary connection to my CGM device. In that moment, the WiFi dropped on my laptop (Win11).
What I did was turn off BT and AirDrop on the phone. This stabilized the Personal Hotspot enough for me to get several hours of work done without dropping the connection.
One question/observation from other (locked) threads is: Why does Apple products work and non-Apple products (Win, Linux) have problems? Well, it would not take much for Apple to have a larger number of retries and/or a longer delay between retries before the WiFi is considered dropped than Win and/or Linux. This would be at the driver-level and totally in Apple's control.
I was able to observe the BT connection by dragging the top-right of the screen and then long-tapping the WiFi icon. I had to turn off auto-locking to observe the screen for an extended period of time. This is a screen and setting I do not believe to be very commonly used and therefore not often observed.
So, what do I recommend? Well, when starting the Personal Hotspot:
- Close all apps on the phone, even the mission critical ones like the one connecting to a CGM device
- Turn off BT and AirDrop
- Then, enable your Personal Hotspot
I cannot vouch that this will work 100%. That said, I hope it will help bring some sanity back. Good luck.
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Finally, if Apple is paying attention here, your phone drivers are not capable of handling more than one communication link at a time, and BT is trumping WiFi. Get on that, please.