Problem with the built in wifi hotspot

Prickard776

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I seem to have a problem with the built in wifi hotspot. I connect via wifi to car play automatically and not the wifi hot pot. Does anyone know how to get wifi via the hotspot and still use the wireless carplay connection?
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JoeDimwit

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For some stupid reason, CarPlay/Android auto uses a separate, dedicated WiFi network, and not the WiFi hotspot. This makes sense if the driver doesn’t have the WiFi hotspot activated, but is moronic if they do. It’s another thing Ford needs to fix.
 
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Prickard776

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For some stupid reason, CarPlay/Android auto uses a separate, dedicated WiFi network, and not the WiFi hotspot. This makes sense if the driver doesn’t have the WiFi hotspot activated, but is moronic if they do. It’s another thing Ford needs to fix.
Ok, so I'm not doing anything wrong, just have to decide what's more important...the wifi hot spot or wireless carplay.
 

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For now, at least.
Likely forever. While I'm not entirely sure the hardware limitations of it, when you are broadcasting as an SSID (hotspot) your wifi has to be disabled. So if the car is broadcasting as a hotspot to devices within the vehicle, it cannot have wifi enabled which is how carplay/android auto would be connected.
 


BlueDvlTxn

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Ok, so I'm not doing anything wrong, just have to decide what's more important...the wifi hot spot or wireless carplay.
I encountered this as well and decided on the hotspot option. It’s the way phones are made actually - not the car. Phones, tablets etc are designed to connect to a single wifi signal. CarPlay/android auto is designed for a dedicated point to point Wi-Fi connection. The hotspot is a normal Wi-Fi network many devices can connect to for internet access. So - you could have one device connected to CarPlay and a different device connected to the hotspot (in theory - haven’t confirmed this myself). The limitation is the device not the car.
 

JCHLi

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For some stupid reason, CarPlay/Android auto uses a separate, dedicated WiFi network, and not the WiFi hotspot. This makes sense if the driver doesn’t have the WiFi hotspot activated, but is moronic if they do. It’s another thing Ford needs to fix.
I believe this is a phone issue not anything Ford can fix.
 
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Prickard776

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CarPlay/Android use a Wi-Fi Direct, which is peer-to-peer by design, allowing a head unit to communicate directly with a phone. In principle it should be possible to allow forwarding between the head unit's Wi-Fi Direct interface and it's LTE uplink, allowing the phone to utilize the Wi-Fi Direct connection (rather than the phone's own LTE uplink) to reach the Internet - in a Wi-Fi Direct network, the Group Owner's IP address is the default gateway; if the head unit acts as the Group Owner and forwards traffic between this interface and it's LTE uplink, then the attached phone would gain Internet access. But I have not seen this implemented among the very limited number of vehicles with wireless Android Auto that I have driven.

I have a work phone with unlimited data, in that case I don't really care; but my personal phone has a bare-bone prepaid plan ($30/year) and I would like to utilize the vehicle's LTE uplink AND run Android Auto wirelessly.
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