Tips: Wi-Fi hotspot with your Windows 7

The Wireless Hosted Network is a new and interesting feature supported on Windows 7 and up. As described in the documentation, it does two things:

• It splits one physical wireless adapter into more than one virtual adapter - Microsoft calls this Virtual Wi-Fi.
• It turns one of those virtual adapters into a software access point, a so-called SoftAP.

So, if you want to share the internet connection from your laptop - for example, you have a mobile 3G modem in it and you want to share some data with the friends sitting next to you ;) - you already have everything you need, as long as your hardware allows it. Example:

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid="MyHotspot" key="usedpassword" keyUsage=persistent
netsh wlan start hostednetwork

Links:

• About the Wireless Hosted Network