Android Hotspot Not Working? Check the Carrier First

My Spark 40 has shared a hotspot more often than I care to count. The complaint always wears the same disguise: the toggle reads on, the laptop reads connected, nothing loads. The screens for this guide turned up three numbers worth more than any setting name. Turn Off Hotspot Automatically read ten minutes. The connected-device cap read one. The active APN type read default,supl, with no dun in it, on a line where sharing works fine.

Which dead is it? Four symptoms, three faults

A dead hotspot is several faults in one coat.

What you see	What is wrong	Go to
Devices join, nothing loads	Bundle spent, or the APN lost its route	Carrier check
The toggle will not turn on	Mobile data off, or the line is not provisioned	Three causes
The hotspot dies on its own, or a second device never appears	Timeout, a power mode, or the cap	The four checks

If your symptom is not on this map, our hub of 16 Android fixes carries one line for each of the other common faults.

Carrier first: the checks that take a minute

Google's Android help page puts a warning above the phone steps on its hotspot guide: some mobile carriers limit or charge extra for tethering. A block applied on the carrier's side cannot be undone by a toggle on your phone.

The Nigerian picture is friendlier. MTN publishes bundles for mobile and MiFi devices and states no surcharge for sharing on the page. The regulator's table of twelve approved MTN tariff plans carries no tethering line item. A page shows only what a carrier chose to publish, so read that as an absence of a rule.

1. Confirm the bundle is live. Open the carrier's app or dial its data code. MTN's own Data Plans page says bundles are activated by dialling *312#. An expired bundle leaves the hotspot nothing to hand over.
2. Read the bundle's terms, not only its size. Night bundles expire, so one active at 11pm can be gone by morning.
3. Ask when the SIM last moved. A changed SIM or plan is a reason to re-check the APN, because the carrier's settings often never got re-issued.
4. Test the second device on its own connection. If the second device reaches the internet on its own connection, the client is fine.

The traffic leaves through your line, so a carrier sees the sharing at the network level, and no phone setting hides that. This guide explains where a carrier block comes from, not how to get around one.

The screen below shows Wi-Fi switched off, a separate switch from the hotspot toggle.

The APN: reset it first, add dun only on a trigger

An APN tells the phone where to send its data. A bad APN edit stops the phone reaching the network, so reset and read the APN before you edit it.

1. Reset to default first. Search Settings for Access Point Names, open the screen, tap the three-dot menu and choose Reset to default. Resetting to default repairs a half-finished edit.
2. Open the active APN and read the APN type field. The fault usually hides in the APN type field.
3. Add dun only after a trigger fires. The triggers are a SIM or eSIM swap, a plan change, a carrier message about tethering, or an OS update that rewrote the APN.

On a trigger, the fix comes from a carrier, not a forum. Honest Mobile's help centre tells owners to set the APN type to default,DUN. The same page tells owners to create a new APN when the fields refuse to edit. Threads on Samsung's own community forum, from late 2025, report Galaxy hotspots dying after the One UI 8 update with dun missing from the APN type. The One UI 8 report is a community report, not a Samsung document.

Do not add dun to every APN. My own MTN line argues against adding dun everywhere: the active APN reads default,supl with no dun, and sharing works on that line today.

The toggle will not turn on: three causes

1. Mobile data is off. The hotspot hands over mobile data, and with that switch down there is nothing to share.
2. The phone's Wi-Fi radio is off, on builds that want it on. Whether the Wi-Fi toggle must be up varies by version and skin, so check the toggle.
3. The carrier has not provisioned the line for sharing. A provisioning block is not fixable on the phone, and it sends you to the carrier.

It keeps dying: four checks, in order

1. The automatic switch-off timer. The Personal Hotspot screen on the Spark 40 reads Turn Off Hotspot Automatically: 10 minutes. Turn the timeout up, and check what values your build offers.
2. The connected-device cap. The Connection Management screen on the Spark 40 reads Maximum number of connected devices: 1. A blocklisted client is refused too, and both refusals come with no message. Google puts the Wi-Fi hotspot limit at up to 10 other devices, so a cap of 1 belongs to this build.
3. Battery Saver restricting background network. The Power Saving screen on my Spark 40 shows that restriction switched on, and a hotspot counts as background network use for the host phone.
4. Data Saver. Data Saver runs on my Spark 40 with four apps unrestricted, a normal setting and a normal switch to test.

Battery Saver and Data Saver share their roots with why an Android battery drains faster than you expect.

The band, and the one fix that skips this phone

The Wi-Fi band, proven on this phone

The Hotspot Settings screen on the Spark 40 reads AP Band: 2.4 GHz Band. Reach for the AP Band setting when a laptop or an older tablet cannot see the network at all, since a client with no 2.4 GHz radio never finds a 5 GHz one.

The cellular 5G step, which does not apply to the Spark 40

Tecno's own specification page lists the Spark 40 on Android 15 with 2G, 3G and 4G network support and no 5G. The phone has no 5G fallback to offer, and nothing here was tested on 5G.

On phones with 5G, community threads describe two failures that most advice merges. The first is a hotspot that fails only while the phone sits on 5G. The forum fix is to search Settings for Preferred network type and set 4G/LTE, and that fix works for some carriers rather than all. The second is a phone dropping to 4G while sharing, sometimes with heat. That behaviour is power and thermal rather than a fault, and why an Android phone overheats is the right read.

Neither direction carries maker documentation, and the Settings path is free, so an app selling that lock is not needed.

If the phone is fine, check the client in 60 seconds

Forget the network on the second device and join it again, rather than only toggling its Wi-Fi. Isolate one client at a time. If every other client joins and one does not, the fault lives on that client, and why an Android phone keeps dropping Wi-Fi covers the phone side of the same problem.

What I checked on a Tecno Spark 40, and what I could not reproduce

The phone behind this guide is a Tecno Spark 40 running HiOS on Android 15, and every screenshot here was taken on it on 2 October 2026. Every path here was walked on that phone or read on the maker's or Google's page, and how we test a phone has the method.

What I could not reproduce: a carrier block on tethering. Reproducing that failure needs a line on a plan which refuses to share, and the SIM tested here is not one. The fix therefore rests on a carrier's help page rather than a test I ran. Two limits stay visible. The HiOS version and build number were not recorded with the screenshots, so this guide claims no provenance for them. The Data Saver check is a switch to rule out.

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