Personal hotspot

Using your phone as a personal hotspot (tethering your phone)
We don't recommend using your phone as a personal hotspot. Sims on standard mobile tariffs are designed for calls, texts and general use, like daily browsing. They're not made for being used as or in a mobile broadband device, as this eats up a lot of data.

Find out about excessive data use

If you do need to use your smartphone as a personal hotspot on a one-off basis, you can share your data signal with other smartphones, laptops, iPads and tablets.

When you use your phone as a hotspot, all devices will be using data from your phone. Depending on the amount of devices connected, and what they're being used for, your data could be used up very quickly.

Setting up a personal hotspot
To use your phone as a personal hotspot, you’ll need a 3G or 4G connection.

For Pay Monthly customers, if you have an iPhone or Android, simply switch Personal Hotspot on to get started.

If you’re a Pay As You Go customer, you can now tether up to five devices on your iPhone if you have:

• an iPhone 5 or newer
• iOS 10.1 or newer - to update your iOS software, go to Settings, then tap General, Software update to check if any update is available
• your carrier setting as version O2 26.1 – to update your carrier settings, you need to go to Settings, then tap General, About and, if available, a pop up should appear to change the carrier setting.

On Windows Phone, you need to go to Settings, then tap Internet sharing, Share over, and Wifi. Then make sure Sharing is set to On.

Once you've done this, you can connect to the hotspot the same way you'd connect to any wifi network. You can also pair devices over Bluetooth, or use a USB cable.

You can set a password for your hotspot to stop other people from connecting to it. Just make sure you give the password to the people you want to share your data with.