Automatic hotspot - does the iPad treat it as a cellular or wifi connection?

[BrettDS]

Has anyone played around with the automatic hotspot feature yet? On paper this sounds awesome and could save me several hundred dollars a year by not buying cellular iPads or data plans for them.

However, this also has the potential to accidentally burn through my phone's data plan as well if the iPad doesn't treat it as a cellular connection.

Like my phone, my cellular iPad won't download large apps over it's cellular connection, nor will it automatically update apps over the cellular connection. It won't automatically upload photos to photostream over the cellular connection, and whenever it gets a wifi connection it uses that instead of the cellular connection.

With iOS 7 when you manually connect to a phone's hotspot it treats it as a wifi connection. It doesn't have any of the above limitations and if another wifi connection becomes available it will still keep using the hotspot until you manually change it. Like I said, if the automatic hotspot feature works this way I can see a lot of data overage charges in my future.

Has anyone played around with this feature to see how it works? I just disabled the cellular modem on my iPad and I'm planning to use it over the next few days or weeks, so I'll update this thread if no one else knows the answer.

 

[outphase]

It doesn't change the nature of the hotspot connection. It only makes it faster/easier to connect. To answer your question, it's treated the same, as a WiFi connection.

 

[rritterson]

given that iPads are aware when they are tethering, it would be incredibly simple for Apple to treat them as a cellular connection.

File a feature request using the Apple bug reporter and maybe it will change in a future beta.

 

[rpungello]

given that iPads are aware when they are tethering, it would be incredibly simple for Apple to treat them as a cellular connection.

File a feature request using the Apple bug reporter and maybe it will change in a future beta.

It'd be nice to see something similar to Android where you can manually designate certain WiFi connections as hotspots, so the OS will treat it like a mobile connection.

Though having it happen automatically when tethered to iPhones would be nice as well, but the ability to do it manually means you can get the same feature with, say, a MiFi device.