[TUTORIAL] Creating Wifi Hotspot in Windows 8.1

So, I heard some people having some difficulties in creating a wifi hotspot in Windows 8.1. Well, let's fire up the very first post for this blog with "How to create a wifi hotspot in Windows 8.1". This tutorial is applicable for Windows 7 and Windows 8 too. *yay!*

Since Windows 7, it is called as the Hosted Network which is a new feature to enable to a single wireless adapter to be able to create a another virtual adapter out of itself and broadcasting the software access point (SoftAP). In another words, a single hardware wireless adapter is having two drivers. One is used for connecting to the cloud, while another one is act as an access point. *Again, yay!*

Before we start our tutorial, let's make sure our wireless adapter's drivers is able to do so. Now, let's fire up our command prompt and get our hands dirty. A great improvement since Windows 8 which I favored a lot is the shortcut key to start our command prompt. *Please be aware that, we will need to do this in Command Prompt as an Administrator.*

By pressing the "Windows + X" button, we will see a menu list as below:

In the shortcut menu list, we can easily access to other utilities in our pc. However, in our case we would like to fire up our Command Prompt with Administrator privilege. So, press the button "A" followed up and we got our command prompt with admin privilege as shown in the picture. You will found this shortcut key very useful once you get used to it.

The next thing is, we want to check whether our wireless adapter able to create a hosted network.

netsh wlan show drivers

So, after confirmed our wireless adapter able to support hosted network feature. Without any further delay, copy and paste the code below and paste into the command prompt.

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid="SSIDNAME" key="WIFI@KEY" keyUsage=persistent

Replace the SSIDNAME to your desired SSID and WIFI@KEY to your desired wireless key. The wireless key need to be at least 8 characters. The recommended one are the combinations of numbers, alphabets and special symbols with at least 8 characters in overall.

At this stage, we have successfully created our hostednetwork. You will see an extra network adapter appear out of nowhere in your Network Connections place.

Next, let's start the hostednetwork to be visible to the other clients.

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

Connect your client to the SSID created few seconds ago and input the wireless key. But still, we do not have internet connection for this adapter. So, we will be going to use the Internet Connection Sharing feature by Microsoft and share the internet connection from the current adapter which is connecting to the internet.

Right Click (on the adapter with internet connection) > Properties > Sharing Tab > Tick (Allow other network users to connect... ) > Select your virtual adapter created just now.

Voila! Your client should be able to connect to the internet by connecting to your SoftAP with SSID "SSIDNAME" now.

Note: If your client is having difficulty in obtaining IP address, I will suggest to set static IP to your devices by following the configuration as below:

IP Address: 192.168.137.x --- "x" can be any numbers range from 2-254, e.g.: 192.168.137.100
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.137.1
DNS 1: 8.8.8.8
DNS 2: 8.8.4.4