Most of the hotels i have been (especially in South East Asia and even in Korea) have this weird thing about them. They give you the wired internet for free, but charge you pretty exorbitantly for the wireless (a.k.a. wifi) internet. This article will explain you how to turn your Mac into a wireless hotspot and share your mac’s internet connection with your phone and iPad (or anything else that requires you to connect to a wireless router).
Turning Your Mac into a Wifi Hotspot
Configuring your Mac to Share Existing Internet Connection
1. Click on the Apple Menu on the top and open System Preferences. On Mavericks, you can also use the Launchpad to open System Preferences.
2. Once inside System Preferences window, you need to click on the Sharing icon. (Refer to the image below)
Sharing your Mac’s internet connection and turning it into a Wireless Hotspot
3. You will now be presented with various options, which can be used to share your Mac’s resources from screen to a USB to a Bluetooth. Anything can be shared using this menu. We are going to stick to our original cause of sharing the Internet using the mac’s inbuilt wireless interface.
Click on the checkbox which says “Internet Sharing”.
4. On the right hand side, click on the drop-down which says “Share your connection from”. You will be presented with options like “Ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth etc”. In my case, am going to stick with Ethernet (as we have a free ethernet / wired connection at Hotels). Select Ethernet and your screen should look like below
5. Now we need to specify the mode by which we will be sharing the internet connection. (remember, we already specified that we want to share our ethernet internet connection in previous step). In our case, because we wish to have a free Wifi internet connection, we will go for the choice “Wi-Fi”. Select Wifi from the list and also select Internet Sharing from the left pane checkbox.
Sharing your Mac’s Internet
When you enable Internet Sharing, you will see an alert warning. Read through it and click on Start.
Turning on Internet Sharing on your Mac
6. You might want to also change the Wifi Options to enable security and change the name of your Wifi Network.
Configuring Wifi Options for your Mac Hotspot
Configuring your Mac as a Wifi Hotspot
At the End – A word of Caution
While i have personally used this hack for a few hours at a stretch at various hotels, i would suggest not turning this feature on “always”, as this might cause stress on your hardware components (after all, your mac was not build to be a router) and lead to issues later. (this hasn’t been proved though, yet, as far as my knowledge goes).
Also by default, there is no security set, but i strongly recommend that you set a new name and password for your Mac’s Hotspot wifi, else someone might just easily hack Wifi connection using one of these 5 free tools.
The post [How-To] Turn Your Mac into a Hotspot (Never Pay for the Hotel Wifi Again) appeared first on Technofriends.
