Personal Hotspot Wifi SSID is not visible

I think you are running into the following issue.

From: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2756

Note: If you leave the Personal Hotspot screen or put iPhone to sleep, iPhone only broadcasts the Wi-Fi network for an additional 90 seconds. If no devices join the Wi-Fi network during that time, iPhone 4 stops broadcasting your Wi-Fi network. You can start broadcasting your Wi-Fi network again by tapping Settings > Personal Hotspot.

So, if I understand correctly, if you leave your iphone on the the Settings --> Personal Hotspot screen, than it shouldn't stop broadcasting.

Hello my iphone 5s dint have a hotspot feature i finally had a way ti activate it but notices wgen the hotspot is turned on, there isnt wifi signal indicator obviously i cant hotspot to others. any idea how i can rectify this? thanks

I have the same issue as @Mactoyz. I don't think it's the thing in the knowledge base, because my iPad is already connected before I turn the screen off on my iPhone. I've also tried leaving the iPhone screen on, and it still misbehaves. It will start to work, and I'll click through to a few things, then it'll just suddenly drop the connection to the iPhone (links icon disappears). To get it back, I have to play around in the setting of one or both devices. This is hugely frustrating and it really makes the feature useless to me. If anyone else has an idea, I'd sure appreciate it.

another option is that the device you are trying to connect doesn't like the phones name, apparently it needs to only contain ASCII characters. I'd remove spaces and any characters that are not letters or numerals.

Thanks for the reply. That's exactly the sort of idea I was hoping to come across... some innocuous little thing I could do to get it working. Unfortunately, mine isn't this particular problem as both my device names are simple ASCII letter words already, with no spaces or other special characters. I'm glad you replied for another reason, though. With no luck getting it working, I've been meaning to call Verizon and cancel the service and this reminded me to do that. I hope your observation helps someone else who comes looking here for answers, though.

I'd had the same problem for weeks (ie. SSID not appearing on ANY computers) and came across a website that mentioned turning the Personal Hotspot on via Setting>General>Network, instead of the obivous Setting>Personal Hotspot.

It's now working!! So to reiterate, don't use the first Personal Hotspot option in settings, turn it on and off via General>Network> (scroll down) Personal Hotspot.

This is clearly a bug.

I found the recent iOS5.1 update didnt help, nor did switching flight mode on and off (with sometimes hepls with poor carrier data bandwidth).

The other option you could try (which I didn't need to) was to Reset Network Settings under General>Reset. (But I expect this may just reset the 3G data carrier settings and not all the phone network settings. If you try this I guess you may want to record you phone carrier settings first or at least have their tech support number handy in cse the iPhone doesn't magically find them from the network (or if you have an unlocked phone on another network).

All the best, hope it helps.

Theres a way to fix it i notiss by placing the underscore between the spaces for your iphone name under settings/general/ name it lets u use your wireless for ps3 and xbox

I still can't get my iPhone SSID visible on my computers. I had meant to update my post above to say that it only fixed it for one or two connections, now it still out.

I tried using an SSID with no spaces (ie underscores) but this didn't help.

Think I'll try a hard reset or something, or cough up the $60 odd for apple care / 3yr warranty.

Anyone else with the same problem still, or find my fix above worked for longer?

It may be worth adding that I'm not on iCloud, and found it stopped working after a few OS updates, but who knows.

Anyone else with this problem also not on iCloud or consider any other issues that may be relevant?

Your post helped me. My problem is similar.
I cannot see the SSID at all, I have to connect manualy each time.

Now at know at least that I the SSID is not broadcasted anymore. I suspect that when the SSID is not broadcasted, new wifi connections are also not accepted.

So now I just turn wifi off and on on the iPhone 4 / iOS 7.1.2, and go to the hotspot screen. Then on the iPhone 6 I connect manualy to the wifi. It is time consuming, but at least it works.

Can you or anyone else confirm that when the SSID is not broadcasted, you can also not connect to the hotspot?

Alex