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mlody

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 11, 2012
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Windy City
Since upgrading to the latest iOS - 15.5, I noticed that my personal hotspot is not functional. my mac running the latest macOS will connect, but nothing will load. Is anyone else having an issue with the personal hotspot on the latest iOS/macOS?
 
so my problem appears to be mostly in Safari. When i connect my laptop to my iPhone (Verizon) Edge browser works, but Safari all of sudden stops. Any idea what setting might be causing this behavior ?
 
Since upgrading to the latest iOS - 15.5, I noticed that my personal hotspot is not functional. my mac running the latest macOS will connect, but nothing will load. Is anyone else having an issue with the personal hotspot on the latest iOS/macOS?
Have you done any updates to carrier settings?
 
so it turns out that the Verizon's DNS servers that my hotspot was serving, were acting up. Once I changed the DNS servers, things started to run smoothly. Hopefully this helps someone who might be expiriencing similar issue.
 
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That's an odd behavior as DNS will affect even your regular phone traffic, not just the hotspot feature.

I've noticed with Speedtest that Verizon throttles hotspot data but not regular iPhone data so I assume they're using different servers for native and hotspot connection.
 
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I use hotspot frequently on my Mac to my iPhone. Sometimes I'll notice that the phone gets in the state where it acts like nothing has internet when I try to use it as a personal hotspot for my iPad and my MacBook.

This requires an iPhone reboot. (Volume Up, Volume Down, hold down power till the phone reboots).

After this? All good.

Noticed the same on my wife's iPhone.

Just a note to others who may have similar problems.

Re - thread - been noticing a lot of DNS issues this last week as well...
 
This is just a wild ass guess but your symptoms and solution are describing a problem with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which is a feature of Private Relay to encrypt your DNS queries). It only effected Safari, and it was fixed by messing with DNS settings.

Screen Shot 2022-06-12 at 3.59.37 PM.png
(That is in DNS settings in Network settings)

Again a guess, you might not even have Private Relay or maybe its not turned on.

However if it is it could be 1 of 2 things.

One, you were on a public wi-fi that had a login portal which DoH doesn't play well with by its very nature.

Two, a fluke with DNS. Happens with encrypted DNS on occasion.

Three, Verizon blocks the port is uses (443 I believe) when tethering. The reason they would do this is because tethering is highly policed, monitored and limited, 15gb before your throttled on Verizon I believe? DNS queries tells them what you are doing. But if they can't see your DNS queries they can't throttle your internet speed when your using a service thats heavy on their network, mostly streaming services.

They do claim their DNS servers block malicious attacks (DNS poisoning) and provide better service by load balancing. Its hard to overlook how they conveniently leave out they lose a lot of control of what you are doing on their network though....suspicious even.

Unfortunately I dont have tethering to test this out but if you do have the feature see if you can enable it in Settings > AppleID > Private Relay (beta) and Safari's preferences under the privacy tab...

Screen Shot 2022-06-12 at 8.29.24 PM.png

Screen Shot 2022-06-12 at 8.21.32 PM.png

And see if you can enable it in Network settings under you phones tethering connection...

Screen Shot 2022-06-12 at 4.18.48 PM.png

Then test out Safari again. I'm assuming it was a fluke but some mobile telco's are blocking Private Relay, T-Mobile I believe so I wouldn't put it past Verizon to block it where they use DNS queries on a regular basis.
 
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Had slow hotspot on T-Mobile. Called them and they confirmed that data was slowed after a certain data limit. They raised the limit and no problems since.
 
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