did you uninstall the driver first?

Yes I did, but that was a while ago. It reinstalled happily. 

seems to me your carrier internet connection is the issue and your impression the phone itself always works fine might be just an impression. note the computer probably uses up quite a lot of bandwidth under the hood which may reveal issues you only have when it is there.

you probably want to check whether the pc to phone wifi connection is stable separately. possible wifi issues include saturated wifi channels. since the wifi typically hops from channel to channel, sometimes you just get unlucky. but it seems unlikely since usb tests are also bad.

i would rule out the tethering since the old phone that worked now has the same issue. likewise i hardly believe something on the computer side is the issue unless you made changes such as adding antivirus software.

what did change is the phone and i presume your carrier might as well since you switched to a 5G enabled lease.

you may want to expand on what intermittent means. do you loose the wifi network ? experience slowdowns ? occasionnal dns error ? packet loss ? for a split second or a few minutes at a time ? …

A couple of answers to your questions.

• I will be able to try different PCs tomorrow and Monday. I'll keep you informed. But remember, this is intermittent.
• The phone is my only access point.
• Both the old and the new phone use 5G, with the same carrier (TPG) I have used for about 10 years.
• I have found that if I select flight mode on both PC and phone for 10 seconds, and then return to normal mode, it usually works. Selecting flight mode on just one device usually does not help. Note that I'm saying “usually”. This is very intermittent.
• When it fails I do not lose the WiFi network, just internet access (which seems to point to the phone). Sometimes I get “no internet”, other times I lose DNS service, or the majority of packets get lost.
• I do not know how long the problem lasts, or if it corrects itself, as I start trying to fix it as soon as the problem appears.
• I have turned now 5G off on my phone, to see if that may be the problem.

UPDATE: switching to 4G does not remove the problem.

sorry for the 5G bother. i was under the impression you had recently upgraded to 5G.

4G is significantly less stable than previous techs in many areas. usually non urban. but the earlier techs provide much more limited throughput. i am unsure how 5G fares compared to 4G. much less in your location.

i would suggest you run simultaneous and continuous pings to the phone and whatever online resource. if regular pings do not fail sufficiently, you can use huge sizes such as 2000. whenever it fails, check what fails.

alternatively run a ping on the phone itself.

note that a working ping does not mean you do not loose other packets. but a intermittently broken one definitely shows something is wrong.

Ping is one of the tests I use when it fails. But it's not consistent. Sometimes it cannot find the remote host (I use www.google.com), other times it times out.

Right now I can ping fine from the PC with the standard 32 bytes (reply times vary from 78 to 225 ms), but 2000 bytes times out. That seems to be consistent. Anything above about 1300 starts getting timeouts.

ping tests in such context reveal stuff when you keep the ping running all the time preferably on multiple targets. just pinging to confirm you can't reach google when you already know it does not work will not provide much debug info. comparing the amount of packet loss on the 2 targets after you experienced the issue a few times reveals much more.

i was expecting some size limitation. these can indicate mtu/mru issues and/or conditions where some router will need to aggregate or split large packets. if you want to dig, you would typically try to see which router limits you and what is the limit. run a traceroute. 1300 suggests multiple layers of encapsulation and at least one hop is probably receiving fragmented packets which it needs to reaggregate which costs performance your phone and/or some isp router might not cope with. sometimes lowering your own mtu voluntarily can help but the issue is unfortunately more often on the download side so beyond your control.

also note your rtt is very irregular. not enough to break connections but enough to trigger slow startups and application lag quite easily on it's own. nevertheless that's expected with wifi + xG

I used my hotspot with a different PC today. It ran for 4 hours without any hiccup. I cannot remember when it last worked that long with my home PC but still, it may have been a coincidence. I'll tray again on Monday with a different PC.

Ping statistics were the same as at home: same delay time, and 2000 bytes is too much.

EDIT

That was 5 minutes ago, perhaps 10 minutes after switch-on. It just went dead again now. Ping gives the message “Ping request could not find host www.google.com. Please check the name and try again”

Going to flight mode and back cured it.

check whether pinging the router works when things fail. at least you know where to look. forget the rest of the debug for now.

I can usually still ping the router (phone) when internet is down. However, occasionally I get the message that “ping transmit failed”.

I have found some websites that recommend things to do when that happens. This one seems to be one of the most useful. Unless you have some other suggestions, I will try its recommendations next time it happens. Other sites recommend things like running the Windows Troubleshooter!

you need to COMPARE ping to the gw and whichever wan resource is expected to work, imho. i feel no urge to fish in the dark either way.

Sorry skullnobrains, I do not understand “you need to COMPARE ping to the gw and whichever wan resource is expected to work”. 

Does "gw" mean gateway, i.e. the phone?

Which “wan resource” should I expect to work? Is that the phone again?

gw is gateway, yes

keep the pings (maybe 8.8.8.8 and the gw. 192.168.0.1 or 1.1 probably ) running pretty much all the time and take a look after a few failures. you need to determine whether the issue is on the wifi or internet side .

It has yet to fail on any PC but mine.

My PC failed once, before I had continuous pings running. I did note that it reconnected when I enabled/disabled flight mode on the PC (not on the phone).

I now have ping running all the time. When I have the problem I'll post screenshots. 

One thing you could check are any power management settings. It could be that when it kicks in for your NIC, it doesn't recover properly.

That's not likely to be the cause. The reason is that my up-time ranges from zero (no connection on power-on) to several hours. In between those limits, it can fail at any time.   

i would concur. that said power settings are indeed one cause for randomly erratic wifi issues. anyway, let's see the ping test results so we know whether the wifi is unstable in the first place.

Sleep time is set to 2 hours. I have also checked power saving settings for 

WiFi: set for Maximum performance

PCI Express:  was set to Moderate, now set to Off

I tried it again with a different PC today, and something really strange happened. 

I started 2 CMD windows with pings to google and the phone. After running fine for about an hour, I noticed the internet connection disappeared. On checking I found that both pings had suddenly stopped dead. There was no timeout or any other message, they just stopped. When I used Ctrl-C to kill the pings and then restarted them, timeouts began.

That implied the phone is the problem. However, when I connected the PC to its usual router, that gave timeouts as well. After switching to flight mode and back, it came good, but so did the connection via my phone.

I'm lost.

maybe best to reinstall phone?

@nobus At this stage I have no intention of resetting the phone to factory defaults (if that is what you mean by “reinstall”). I have done several network resets, but they have not helped at all.

assuming you connected the phone via wifi to the router, that looks like a crowded wifi.

was the router cnx indeed wifi ?

are both wifis 2.4 or 5GHz ?

are you confident all devices use usa settings ?

 is she in dense urban area ?

can you try wifi scanner or equivalent ? or maybe some scanning feature in the router ui ?

--

btw, using a channel that is reserved for law enforcement seems like a very efficient way to see the van closely ;)

factory reset  = not equal to network reset imo, and it only takes 10 minutes

@skullnobrains

The phone was using 5G, and was not connected to a router.

The router is an Inseego MiFi X PRO 5G mobile hotspot.

Both phone and router use 5GHz.

I'm in Australia, not USA. I have no idea what you mean by “a channel used for law enforcement”.

@nobus

Yes, a factory reset does not take long. Getting everything back on the phone the way I want it is a different matter though…

During normal running the ping tests are normal, with times to the phone of a couple of ms, to the internet about 30ms. Occasionally they are a bit longer and, very rarely, I get a timeout. Then, when the problem happens, I get continuous timeouts on both. Or, like yesterday, it just stopped altogether.

5G is expected to be more reliable but obviously we do not know about your particular situation such as urban density.

i assumed usa because you mentionned some 3 letter agency in the q. wifi channels vary with regions. some public channels in one country are cop or military frequencies in others. i am not in the us either, btw

if both pings stop entirely at the same time, your issue is a total loss from of the wifi. probably beacon loss entirely and the computer needs to register again before things resume.

which is why environmental information would be useful. are you movinv around ? are there walls ? distance ? moving parts ? dense urban area ? power lines  ? ? water has high incidence on 2.4 but probably signigicantly less on 5G. some shithead playing with a wifi cracker would also produce these results though that is not my first bet unless you have an actual reason to believe otherwise.

if you have a droid phone, try wifiscanner. sole routers have the ability to show busy channels in the ui.

I just switched the PC on. My test pings to internet and phone immediately failed, with the message “PING: transmit failed. General failure.” Note that, if I disable the phone's hotspot, I just get timeout errors, not a general failure.

Switching the PC to flight mode and back fixed everything. 

Does all this mean it is a PC problem after all? I'm confused with all the conflicting happenings - the last problem implicated the phone, not the PC.

Environmental info. Remember that the phone is my router. It is lying on my desk, within 1m of the PC; there is nothing substantial (just one LCD monitor) between the phone and the WiFi antennas at the back of the PC. The phone indicates a 5G full strength signal, and the PC indicates full strength WiFi (when it works).

Where do I find wifiscanner? I cannot find it in PlayStore. And what will it tell me? I already know that the WiFi connection is broken when the problem happens.

it is a wifi problem. plain obvious.

my “wifiscanner” is related to the wlanscanner github project.

it comes from fdroid rather than the playstore though i believe it is also available from the official store. there are tons of such apps so wifi analyzer or whatever similar app will do the job. just pick one and if the results do not look like a nice graph where you can see all channels and how crowded they are, just pick another one.

wifi tends to hop from channel to channel. the larger the band the more chances a hop is triggered by one of the band being crowded or scanned. basically the dfs channels allow frequency switch and the connection quite often breaks when the switch happens in the 5G band and the non dfs bands are crowded pretty much everywhere.

having an antenna on your desk does not necessarily help. actually wifi works often poorly when you are too close especially in a small room and that has little incidence on issues triggered by other folks cluttering the band.

the scanner should let you figure out a not too crowded band or you can just randomly select one in the middle or far end from your router. you can also reduce the channel width to 40 or 20 if you are using 80. you will loose a little bandwidth but gain a lot of stability. even switching to 2.4 sometimes make sense though nothing beats a wire when the router is that close and easy to access. it is one of the few cases where randomly trying is quite likely to actually work since most routers clutter the same bands.

So would it make a difference if I put the phone further away from the PC?

I do not know how to select different bands, but remember that I do not use a router, I use my phone instead of a router.

It failed again shortly after power-on, but unlike yesterday, this time I had to switch both PC and phone into flight mode to fix it. Ping was still working between PC and phone, but not to the internet.

<< So would it make a difference if I put the phone further away from the PC? >>

it might but given the issue you describe, i am ,not expecting much if anything.

i just wanted to stress out being on the same table at the router does not improve anything.

<< I do not know how to select different bands, but remember that I do not use a router, I use my phone instead of a router. >>

my bad. you also mentionned a router but i just realised the mifi mx whatever is actually a mobile hotspot.

… i have no idea and i am not even sure that is feasible without rooting the phone and fiddling with the hotspot configs.

… but you can check for crowded bands nevertheless and use the phone to see how the router behaves and possibly what creates the situation.

it might help to show what is actually configurable in the router. pretty much you cannot configure anything regarding the droid hotspot.

if you are just into trying stuff, you can try 2.4GHz wifi as well. these days, chances are it is less impacted by whatever breaks the wifi or you can try a different location if possible.

<< It failed again shortly after power-on, but unlike yesterday, this time I had to switch both PC and phone into flight mode to fix it. >>

pretty sure switching to flight mode does not fix anything beyond resetting the wifi. have you tried waiting for a few minutes ? when the problem just happened is the perfect time to launch the wifi scanner.

<< Ping was still working between PC and phone, but not to the internet. >>

pretty sure that is due to the flight mode but feel free to correct if i am guessing wrong.

you mentionned you were in australia but not much regarding how crowded the environment is.

given the situation, i believe you either experience some environmental issue ( those are quite frequent with wifi ) or a mismatch between the localization settings of the computer and hotspot.

australia has many more available bands than other countries so for example if your computer is set to USA, you will loose connectivity when the router picks one of said bands which can happen within minutes or much more depending on how lucky you are.

crowded environments produce the same results as the noise will vary quite randomly based on which band both your and the other wifis decide to pick at a given time. some aps try to avoid crowded bands but that does not work well.

@skullnobrains, thanks for sticking with this. Some answers to your comments.

I have tried 2.4GHz in the past and found the same problems.

When I lose connection, it does come good sometimes, but not always (or maybe I'm just too impatient). It's very random.

The Inseego MiFi X PRO 5G is in a completely different location, where I use a laptop, not my desktop.

When ping failed to the internet, that was before I switched to flight mode. I only ever use flight mode for 10 secs, to reset the WiFi connection.

I am in an apartment building with lots of WiFis, so perhaps that is affecting it.

I'll try installing a WiFi scanner on Wednesday and see what it tells me.

Just noticed something really weird. Right now I can ping the internet, but NOT my phone. How does that work???

btw, i took a quick look at the doc and your mifi xp comes with all the regular settings including channels, encryption, hiding your SSID ….

my very first idea would be to use a fixed channel in the middle of the spectrum and see how that goes. channels that are forbidden in various locations are usually towards the edge. this also avoids beacon losses when the ap switches channels.

Yes, I was amazed that I could ping the internet, but only got timeouts from the phone. And no, the PC does not have any other internet connection. I run 2 CMD windows, with a different ping in each (ping -t x.x.x.x).

The MIFI is not mine, but it is the normal WiFi router at a place where I volunteer on Fridays. It usually works well, but has been known to play up in the past.

As for localisation settings, my phone was purchased from a reputable Australian supplier. I set it up from scratch myself, and it is definitely not set to the wrong country.

As I understand it, the WiFi scanner would have to run on the PC. Perhaps something like this? Running it on the phone would only let me evaluate WiFi networks that the phone can use. As the phone is not connected via WiFi, that would seem to be superfluous.

hmm. no idea about the ping mystery.

localisation issues would rather be on the computer. australia has more bands and the access point chooses the channel.

the scanner had better be ran on a separate device while the phone is in use.

i cannot access the link with my phone. my browser is too exotic for their dumb waf.

the one i use is called wifi analyser. it is for droid and i do nit believe there is an iphone version. but there are many others.

But, as the phone does not use wifi to access the internet, will it help with the phone-to-PC connection?  

as i gather, the phone does not have internet connectivity issues or much less than what is currently annoying since any time you tried pinging, the wifi was dead. the scanner is only about understanding why the wifi (phone to pc) connection dies on you.

i forgot to ask whether it also happens when the phone is plugged and the battery reasonably full.

next time it happens, you may want to keep the pings running and jump on the phone to load any random internet page and confirm the phone's internet connection is ok. my guess is it will work but if both die at the same time, the issue is probably on the phone itself.

I have the same problems regardless of whether I use 2.4GHz or 5GHz. I have not installed a scanner, as it would seem that the phone doesn't give me the flexibility to change channels.

I did solve one baffling problem: why I can sometimes ping the internet, but not the phone. It turns out the phone does not always use the same g/w address. Instead of something like 192.168.79.1, it uses 192.168.79.x where x is variable. I'll have to check the correct address before starting the phone ping.

i am unsure i can help you.

at least you know the internet carrier is not the issue.

the one thing you may want to try is to lower the security level to open or basic wpa on the phone and some older norm such as 802.11a or n and see if that helps. but i doubt it will make much of a difference. that usually rather helps with low signal. and i am not sure how to do that on your systems.

no idea about the changing ip but apple seems to be keen on randomizing all sorts of hard and soft identifiers allegedly to protect your privacy or make you “safer” which is just a blatant lie. like they care or do not steal your personal information in the first place.

there are reports that apple phones hotspots only work reliably with apple computers and reports saying that is by design. i have no idea about either of these assertions.

if you are interested in portable alternatives, you can find usb dongles that come with a sim card and phone line, or you can grab some old droid or possibly some other type of connection such as satellite.

I don't think this is about apple for once, but rather android. The jumping GW IP would indicate an issue with the android app that provides the hotspot functionality. Particularly if that changes during usage, that could be the cause of the problem. Have you checked you are running the last android version available for your phone?

unless i am mistaken  the phone is an iphone… ?

i do concur changing the gateway after the connection is made would definitely cause issues.

technically speaking, one may try to use short dhcp leases and push new routes when the lease changes but that is bound to be ignored by many clients and work erratically at best and for a single machine.

it would seem weird anyone could come with such an idiotic idea and manage to push it world wide but nowadays everything is possible. hey they managed to convince people that encrypting the device with a key that is stored on the device itself made sense.

nb the changing gateway would also happen if someone is trying to play an mitm attack with a rogue dhcp.

No it's not an iPhone. The title of my question is “ Intermittent hotspot on Android phone” 😆

While strange, the changing gw address is not normally a problem, as dhcp takes care of that. 

What still bugs me is that  sometimes the problem is resolved by selecting flight mode on the pc, sometimes on the phone, and sometimes I need both. There is no consistency.  

my bad. i must have mixed with another q. then i fail to see why using a scanner is difficult. what is configurable varies with the models and vendors and android version.

what settings do you have ?

not sure that helps but my own droid has rather stable connectivity. good enough for video conf over a vpn from a 10-20m distance. as a side note, it was unstable when i used a windows office computer. i would typically loose the connection for 30-60 seconds but it did reconnect automatically. the hardware was different and never had time to do proper comparisons.

the flight mode merely resets the connection.

unless i am mistaken, you said somewhere above a different computer had the same issue which means the computer is not the issue. and you had the same issue with a different device in a different location which would indicate a computer issue. i am unsure what to do with this information.

it might make sense to check the connection with some live linux os on the same hardware.

And then there is this fact I also stated earlier: I swapped the SIM into an old phone, which had worked perfectly for years, and had the same problem. That would again exonerate the phone.

I know that flight mode only resets the connection. I'll try ipconfig /renew next time.

Maybe it's an issue with your SIM card provider. It might only connect to “Data” when the phone actually needs a Data connection.

ipconfig will not solve a wifi issue. but it would solve a changing gateway assuming the vendor was stupid enough to make the hotspot change ip mid way.

+1 for the possibility android or the vendor added some smarts regarding the data cnx.

for now, one possibility would be the difference is environmental. which is why i wondered about testing in an entirely different location.

some droid or windows update impacting multiple devices also seems possible. as a comparison, my droid is vastly outdated. did you by any chance update the old phone since it last worked ? i presume all your computers are more or less current and you only have windows machines ?

The hotspot only changes IP when I reset the phone.

The old phone has not been updated and yes, both PCs are running Windows 10/11.

changing ip when you reset is useless but also harmless.

can you confirm the pcs currently have stable connections to any other wifi ?

i would definitely try a live dist at this point.

Well, it has not played up since my last post.

I do not have any other WiFi to connect my home PC, except that I did try my old phone. The other PC has a mostly trouble free connection to the MIFI, although we sometimes have to connect it to another available WiFi, when the MIFI fails.

What do you mean by “live dist”?

live dist : i meant trying a distinct operating system on a usb key. idea being to determine whether windows is part of the issue or not.

the fact it currently works fine either demonstrates some environmental condition changed or some update on either or both side solved the issue at least temporarily.

the fact the mifi works and the current situalion make me lean towards environmental once more though it will proove difficult to be entirely sure unless  some scanner allowed to identify some change consistent with your observation.

I have installed Netspot on my PC. My phone is always the strongest signal, currently on channel 1. I'm waiting for a failure to see if anything changes.

In the last week it has only failed twice. Once it came good after I put the PC in flight mode, the other time I had to set bot phone and PC in flight mode. The other PC I used did not have a problem.

It's now been about 2 weeks without a single glitch. There have been minor updates on both Windows and the phone, but I'm not sure when they happened. Windows is still showing version 10.0.19045 though.

I'll wait a while longer to see if it stays fixed.

note that being the strongest is actually of limited importance in terms of signal. what is important is being alone on your frequency as much as possible. you are much better off with -45dBm attenuation and no other wifi than with -30 and a bunch of other wifis in the -80 to -50 range.

At 2437 MHz my phone always seems to be the strongest signal (typically -43 dBm), at 5785 MHz (-48 dBm) not always. In both cases, other signals at the same frequency are significantly weaker. I usually have it set for  2.4 GHz as I don't need the extra speed.

agreed though this has been tested/discussed above.

i am concerned you have above 40 dBm at such a close range. i would expect 30-ish

Yes, it is strange that my signal strength (at 0.5 m) is quite similar to other routers that are at least 10 times further away, with walls or floors in between as well.

Halving the distance improves the signal to -35 dBm, and puts me about 30 dBm above the next router on the same frequency.

But I do not think signal strength is the problem. Unless it comes back, we may never know what caused it. 

I had another Windows update today, and the connection is still stable.

it is not the signal strength, indeed. 40 or 50 is good enough.

once more being above the next router using the same frequency is of little importance.

much like a conference room will be an awful mess if a number of people speak with their voices down while the speaker shouts  but the same conference room with silence and a speaker who speaks normally will be audible.

As it's been performing flawlessly for a couple of weeks at 2437 MHz, I've decided to try the 5 GHz band. It's now connected at 5785 MHz. NetSpot cannot see any other signal at that frequency.

I'll let you know how this goes.

There has been another Windows update since my last post, but it's still performing flawlessly at 5 GHz. According to Netspot, the phone is usually the strongest 5 GHz signal, and the only one at its frequency (now 5805 MHz - different from last time I checked).

I'm guessing that updates to either Windows or Android fixed it. I'll leave it for another couple of weeks before wrapping this up.

It's been completely stable for about 6 weeks so I guess it's fixed. I'll put the cause down to gremlins (or should that be bugs?), but thank you guys for sticking with me.

yeah… wifi is totally that kind of beast… i remember fixing a wifi issue 2 floors above some parking space by moving a wheelbarrow to the side, the poor guy who had a working wifi 200m away from the house but not in the next room (nickel in the walls), and a number of issues such as fish tanks or rain dependant… lots of weird stuff

In the last couple of weeks, the PC powered up without seeing the hotspot. All other routers in the area are visible, just not my phone. Going to flight mode and back on the PC makes the phone show up, and it connects without any issues. Not a big problem, but I'll try a network reset on the PC and see what happens.

that probably wont help. you would only reset the ip stack which is on a different layer.

have you tried just rescanning the networks on the pc ?

it is also possible the phone has some security feature so if you scan a little agressively, it will blacklist the pc.

likewise many phone hotspots default to allow new connections for a few minutes and reject them afterwards or rather hide the ssid. no idea what apple decided on. you can try to configure the pc to connect to a hidden ssid.

You're right it did not help - it happened again today. Waiting a couple of minutes does not help.

Rescanning networks does not show the phone until I switch to flight mode and back. Then the phone shows up immediately.

I do not know of any special security features on the phone.

I always switch on the hotspot at the same time that I turn on the PC, so the request for connection is almost immediate. And again, this is not Apple.

oupsie, my bad. droids afaik do not have such features. at least my own droid clearly does not do that on it's own.

i am starting to wonder about some weird driver of wifi manager on the computer. it might help to know which and it would probably help a lot to check whether a different device sees the phone next time it happens.

channels mismatch would also still make total sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels. for example, based on the first table, an australian device would not see a north american device if it hopped to the 902-915 band. turning the wifi off and on would select a random and almost certainly different channel until it hops back into said range (or be stable forever if the phone does not hop). similar issues would happen in any of the wifi bands and also with japanease or european settings. note that most devices are preconfigured with north american settings when they do not know in which location they are.

afaik, with 5Ghz, at least some droids just pick a random channel when the wifi is started and stick to it. otoh, 2.4GHz hotspot just hops from channel to channel. either way, there is no way to easily determine which channel is currently used on the phone and i am unsure windows provides that info either. scanners and non windows computers should provide that information in dmesg or wherever wpa_supplicant output is logged to.