How to create wireless hotspot on Windows 8

There are some situations where you may have to create a wireless hotspot from your Windows 8 notebook. For example, you have only a wired LAN connection to the Internet, but have wireless-only devices like smartphones or tablets. In these situations, your Windows 8 notebook can be configured to act as a wireless router offering wireless access to internet to your other gadgets.

This can be done on Windows 8 in a few steps:

• Open a command prompt with Administrator privileges. Use this command prompt for all the commands given below.

• Check if the wireless adapter has support for Hosted Network. This is needed to make it work as a wireless hotspot. This can be checked by using this command:

netsh show wlan drivers

This prints out all the properties of the wireless adapters on your notebook. Look for the property named Hosted network supported and it should be say Yes. If it says No, you are out of luck ☹

• Create a hosted network with a name and a key. Lets assume the network is named foobarwifi and key is foobarkey. The command to create such a network is:

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=foobarwifi key=foobarkey

• Start this hosted network using this command:

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

• Next, we need to link the network connection that has internet access to this wireless hosted network. To do this, open the Network and Sharing Center and go to Change adapter settings. You should be able to see the connection that has internet access. You will also see a Local Area Connection with the name foobarwifi. It will have a * (asterisk) in its name.

• Right-click on the connection with internet access and choose Properties. Switch to the Sharing tab and enable the option: Allow other network users to connect through this computers internet connection. In the dropdown, pick the Local Area Connection that is foobarwifi.

• That is it! Your Windows 8 notebook is now available as a wireless hotspot named foobarwifi to which other devices can connect wirelessly using the key foobarkey.

• This wireless hotspot is temporary and is removed when Windows is rebooted. If you need this hotspot frequently, then create a .bat file on the desktop with the above two command lines in it. Shift + right click on the file and choose Run as Administrator whenever you want the wifi hotspot to be created.

Tried with: Windows 8 x64