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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

I never really understand why you'd rather have one of these over just enabling "hotspot" on your phone. Ethernet is the only reason I can think of

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If you have an Android phone you can connect a USB-C to Ethernet dongle (the same one as you have for your laptop) and get tethering via Ethernet out of it. It works really well.

What if you want your kid(s) and/or partner(s) to stay connected after you leave the hotel room with your phone?

What if you want to use the hotel's internet connection instead of your roaming data?

What if you want to use wireguard or tailscale to funnel all traffic through your home network?

What if you want to enable your family's devices to connect to your self-hosted services?

1. Fair enough.

2. Most Android phones can do this.

3. Android phones can do this.

4. This is just the same question as 3.

2 - without prior config only a bunch can do it, like pixels 3 - there's a difference - you can configure wg/ts on a single device(router) and it's done, or you need to do it on 5X+ devices, phones and laptops and fix the configs on all if something changes

I've been able to do WiFi-WiFi connection sharing on my last four Samsung phones as well

Maybe with newer models it's easier, but older ones you needed to go in some advanced settings to allow sharing the wifi, otherwise it'll disable your wifi connection. For pixels it was enough to just enable it from quick menu

I think every single pixel I've ever had could share wifi or 4g/5g.

sharing 4g/5g can be done from almost any android phone, sharing current wifi connection through a hotspot isn't a widespread function

2,3 and 4 android can do. 1 is very fair but could be achieved with an old phone, maybe with a rubbish battery plugged in.

we take a webcam to keep eye on dogs sometimes. I use a travel router for that

This is a really fair example.

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