Personal Hotspot Missing from iPhone – How to Troubleshoot

Is the personal hotspot option missing in your iPhone or is not appearing now but used to be visible earlier?  iPhone Personal Hotspot was one of the great features announced as part of iOS 4.0; however, for a lot of people, the personal hotspot feature went missing or stopped appearing after they upgraded to iOS 4.3.  Even Apple has failed to address this problem and the troubleshooting steps provided on Apple website do not provide much information about how to really fix the missing personal hotspot problem.  A lot of blogs and websites also claim to provide solutions for the personal hotspot missing problem but none of them go beyond merely resetting the network settings and rebooting the iPhone.  These solutions could have worked for some people, but, for many like myself they didn’t help get the missing personal hotspot back.  It was time for some experiment and recollecting what I had done just before the personal hotspot stopped appearing.  Please follow the steps below to regain access to personal hotspot option if it has stopped appearing on your iPhone:

1. Ensure that you have the data plan that allows Internet tethering.  You can simply call up your telecom carrier to confirm this.

2. From the home screen of your iPhone, go to Settings>General>Profiles and have a look at the listed profiles.  If you see any profile by an app listed here just try finding out what that app’s purpose is.  If that app claims to save data usage charges or alters data usage in any way you have found the culprit.  In my case, it was Onavo which had altered my carrier’s data profile.

3. Tap on the concerned profile to go to its details and tap on “Remove” to remove the profile.

Now go to Settings>General>Network and you should find the missing “Personal Hotspot” option back.

If you still find the personal hotspot missing it is likely that the app has altered the network profile and all you need to do is reset network settings.  Just go to  Settings>General>Reset and tap on “Reset Network Settings”.  After the reset, go to Settings>General>Network and make sure that “Enable 3G” and “Cellular Data” options are set to on.

I was able to get the missing personal hotspot back by following the steps outlined above and hope you will also find it useful.

Short URL: http://www.betadaily.com/?p=6311

Posted by BETA Daily on Sep 10 2011. Filed under Asides, Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry