If you want to use your iPhone Tethering (hotspot) to connect your Surface Tablet on the Internet you can get surprise – Your Tablet doesn’t see your iPhone Hotspot at all.
Problem is that Surface doesn’t recognize WiFi network with special character and you probably have some of not allowed characters in your iPhone name – just go to iPhone Settings -> General -> About -> Name and change the name of your iPhone (don’t use spaces too), switch on Personal HotSpot and your Surface will recognize your Network.
HyperSmash
I still can’t seem to reliably connect. Invariably my Surface does not even see the iPhone. When I first removed the offending characters (an apostrophe), the Surface instantly saw it. But since then it hasn’t seen it the last few days, despite reboots etc… Help!
You have to be on iPhone Personal Hotspot page to be able to see it. As soon as you are out of that screen and there is no actual connection, iPhone will switch off Hotspot.
I am at at ” General -> About -> Name ” but i could not edit to change it ….
Fantastic I dont have a surface tab but this trick worked just the same on my other tablets so it may be a generic problem. Thanks for the info was gettin frustrated!
That’s great. Now the Surface see’s the hotspot. Only problem is that after I type in the WPA password, Windows asks me if I want to share devices. I say YES or NO. Regardless, Surface notifies me that it CANNOT CONNECT. No reason given.
Frustrating!
BTW — iPad connects to hotspot w/out issues.
Apparently numbers are special characters too. I was having this same problem and deleted spaces and apostrophes but left in a number. Did not work. Deleted the number and it connected!
Absolute legend I was just about to throw it through a window.
I have a Surface with similar issues. But after applying David’s advice (deleting special characters, including any apostrophe) it worked fine
I am also finding once the surface tablet recognises my iPhone it “can’t connect to this network” Have to say no Internet connection makes this tablet a hunk of junk – t’is beyond ridiculous and am getting more and more tempted to throw it out a window and hope it lands on microsofts head …. Unless anyone out there has a solution
I’m glad I came across this blog.
I have had similar issues with my Surface a few times. Its very rare, but occasionally gets finicky. Airplane mode on and off wouldn’t fix it. Here is how I got it to see my hotspot.
1. Go to desktop
2. Swipe from the right -> Settings
3. Control Panel
4. Network and sharing center
5. Change Adapter Settings
6. Select the wifi adapter and click ‘Disable this Network Device’
7. Wait a few seconds and enable it again.
8. Now it shows up.
The tablet sees the hotspot on the iphone and it connects, it even loads the first page that I search for, but than it halts. Can’t get past or beyond first page. If iTunes could be loaded to android than I think the problem would be solved.