Yesterday, I had an Internet outage at home. The Internet was down for several hours. This is a perfect time to use Mobile hotspot. But alas, it wasn’t working. I got a couple of “cannot connect to Verizon server”, errors, then I was able to turn it on, the laptops did connect to the wifi network created by the phone, but they still could not reach the Internet. At the same time, I could browse the web from the phone, so something was up.

I restarted the phone: no change.

I tried various helps and how-tos, got nothing.

I opened a chat with “help center” in Verizon App. It pointed me back to the help center articles and advised to call the support line if I had any more questions.

I called their support line. A friendly AI assistant enlightened me that my phone (Motorola Edge 2022) does not support mobile hotspot. Which is, frankly, BS. It then sent me a link to the aforementioned help center chat and said it will hang up, when I go to the link. I didn’t go to the link, and, oh miracle, I was actually connected to the live person.

The live person was only slightly better than the robots, she followed the script, mostly ignoring what I had to say, but by the time we got to checking the connection, it turned out that my Windows laptop can now see the Internet, but my Mac laptop cannot. She advised me to restart the Mac laptop, and what do you know: it started working! The phone call took only 30 minutes. Then she held me on the line a little more, asking to confirm that she solved my problem. Which she did, but I had to say it out loud two or three times at her request.

Anyway, restart is still king. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

PS. I don’t use Mobile Hotspot very often, but every time I do, I run into shenanigans like this. I don’t remember a single time when it just turned on and worked.