I connect my laptop to my phone’s WiFi hotspot. I have a VPN on both devices, but sometimes there’s connection issues on the laptop especially Epic Games (does who know …know) and playing online games in general.
I know it doesn’t work for ad blocking on sites like youtube if I just have the VPN on phone.
Any techies out there?
Check the IP address on both by checking a website for it. If it’s the same, your all good, if different, yes
Short answer - no it won’t work, you will still need the VPN on the computer.
Long answer-
For this to work you will need VPN Hotspot app which is only usable via root. I think it might work without root but you need to use the “temporary hotspot” feature. And that requires you to create a brand new hotspot every single time with new SSID and encryption key.
As others have stated, the default routing for the hotspot does not use the VPN interface on the phone.
If you are already using a VPN on your phone and then connecting your laptop to your phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot, technically, the laptop’s internet traffic is being routed through the VPN connection on your phone. However, the laptop itself does not have a VPN connection of its own in this scenario.
The VPN on your phone provides encryption and anonymity for your phone’s internet traffic. When you connect your laptop to the phone’s hotspot, your laptop’s internet traffic is being tunneled through the VPN on your phone. This means that the connection between your laptop and the phone is secure, but the traffic between your laptop and the websites or online services you access will not be encrypted or protected by the VPN unless you also have a VPN running on the laptop.
So, if you want to ensure that the internet traffic from your laptop is also encrypted and secure, you would need to install and activate a VPN directly on your laptop as well. Using a VPN on your laptop would provide an extra layer of security and privacy for your laptop’s internet activities, independent of the VPN on your phone.
Regarding the connection issues you mentioned, having a VPN running on both devices may introduce additional latency or network congestion, which could potentially affect online gaming performance. If you’re experiencing connection issues with certain applications, such as Epic Games, it might be worth trying to disable the VPN on either your phone or laptop to see if that resolves the problem.
I was able to do a Wire Gaurd VPN on a Raspberry Pi connected to my home wifi, connect my phone to it with an app over the cell network, then run a Hotspot on my phone, and then connect my laptop to my Hotspot and have the same public ip as every other computer on my home network even though I’m using the Verizon 5G data plan on my phone.
I’m a entrepreneur at heart. Would love to start a VPN service of my own in the near future.
just google ‘whats my ip’ on both the phone and pc if they are the same then both are going through vpn…
Yeah OPs question isn’t bad but testing yourself is the only sure answer here.
Thanks for this comment! I tried it myself on an android w/ VPN running the hotspot and an iPhone on its wifi. Was very cool to see different IPs at first, then the android showing the same as the iPhone when I turned off the VPN. Good advice for testing; it was very informative for me.
This is incorrect. You need to root your phone in order to direct hotspot traffic through the VPN. Otherwise it’s a raw connection
Should have mentioned: My only cost was the Pi