Iphone 5 Hotspot Problem

I had the same issue and found the solution.

Pevans1027 is right, the phone shuts down the antennas and stops sharing Wi-Fi. Mine is also working i lock mode.

When you enable Personal Hotspot, do not navigate away from that screen.

As long as you are on the Personal Hotspot screen, the screen where you can see the Hotspot password, the phone will share Wi-Fi.

When you navigate away from that screen the phone shuts down the antennas almost emmediately and stops sharing Wi-Fi.

If you are connected when navigating away from the screen it will continue to share the Wi-Fi as long as you are connected. However, the connection is very sensitive and will drop quite easily. I believe you cannot be idle for more than approx 1 minute.

If you stay on the Hotspot screen and the phone locks it still should share Wi-Fi, it works for me.

Remember that if the phone rings or you get a message or something else you have navigated away from the screen and need to navigete to the Hotspot screen again.

And of course, remember to check the APN and APN HOTSPOT settings 🙂

My iPad 3 works perfectly as a hotspot running iOS 7, opening web pages fast and without hitches. However, although I am able to connect to my iPhone 5s, when trying to open a web page it just times out.

Both devices are used on the same network, both are running latest iOS 7, both devices' APN settings are the same...so is this a hardware problem?

A friend of mine is using his iPhone 5 running iOS 6 as a hotspot and it works perfectly. I'm very frustrated indeed. I've tried the options given by Pevans1027 and Kimmen5, to no avail. Hopefully Apple will address this in the upcoming iOS 7.1 update.

I'm using Verizon LTE on the iPhone 5 and I've noticed a huge difference with 7.0.6, the latest update. Now the hotspot stays active even after turning off devices using the hotspot (iPad2, iPad 4, Lenovo laptop) for many minutes, it used to turn off almost immediately. I noticed this changed behavior immediately with the update to 7.0.6. Also, I no longer get dropped connections and the iPhone screen no longer has to be on hotspot and can even be turned off - it will still connect. This is a big improvement!!

I have n iPhone 5s purchased 3.5 months ago. I have connected my laptop PC to the iPhone and kept a good connection for hours while traveling along an interstate highway. I'm on Verizon and change towers many time on the trip. Probably had LTE or 4G most of the time.

I have a Carlson Exporer 600+ survey data collector with Wi-Fi and cannot get at connection at all with the iPhone hotspot. While researching this problem I noticed the authentica tion protocol on the iPhone 5s hotsport changes between WEP and WPA2-PSK. If this setting is being constantly changed by the iPhone maybe that is why connections are being lost. I have also notice that when the iPhone is not on the Personal spot

I accidently stored my post above before I finished. As I was saying I noticed that when my iPhone 5s is not on the Personal Hotspot screen (even though the hotspot is on) my iPhone hotspot does not show up as an active network on my laptop PC.

My iPhone 5s has iOS 7.1. The OS has been updated at least once since I got the phone. However, once I get my laptop connected to the hotspot it has never dropped out. I don't recall whether I kept the phone on the Personal Hotspot screen the entire time or not.