Unable to connect my Laptop to my iPhone 13 Wi-Fi hotspot connection.

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.

Hello,

First of all, check that you get a good mobile network signal strength. If necessary, change the iPhone location.

The following articles could perhaps be of interest:

How to set up a Personal Hotspot on your iPhone or iPad – Apple Support (UK)

If Personal Hotspot is not working on your iPhone or iPad (Wi-Fi + Cellular) – Apple Support (UK)

I was struggling a bit with the same problem, but since I flagged the option “Connect even if the network isn’t transmitting its name” or something like that, I don’t have this issue anymore. The option is in advanced setting in the network menu of windows.

I was observing the same issue with my iPhone 14 with latest firmware 17.6.1.

I found this solution to be really working.

i have disabled the Bluetooth on my cellphone. Killed all the apps.

enabled maximum compatibility option for the hotspot.

then I have disabled the hotspot for 10-20 seconds and then re-enabled it.

now when I connected my laptop I didn’t any observe the VPN disconnection on my laptop.

it looks like a issue on iPhone side when we enable Bluetooth it causes issue even when my Bluetooth devices are off.

i had tried maximum compatibility option earlier also but it had not helped at that time.

killing the apps may be also helping to redirect all bandwidth to the hotspot.

even after these steps, I see one problem.

my VPN is not disconnecting any more.

but the proxy connection for builds over the vpn fails when the screen is locked. When I open the screen and run the builds, the proxy connections are able to reach to GitHub for fetching content.