Tethered - by USB!

I've just made a rather useful discovery. Perhaps you know all about it, and have done for years past, but this is new to me. And I'm kicking myself for not knowing about it long ago.

Some background. BT have been fiddling around with their green roadside boxes up the road. It used to be just one box, but there has been an explosion of Broadband connectivity and upgrading hereabouts in recent years, and there are now three of them. Those Openreach vans have been parked there on most days, and lately every day.

There seems to be a big problem. It may be that as they've wired in extra green boxes it's all got too much of a wire or fibre spaghetti in each box for even the BT engineers to make sense of. It may be that recent rain has flooded the underground ducts and cabling that feed the boxes. Who knows. But we, the local residents, have been experiencing Internet drop-outs. And yesterday afternoon it was my turn. No BT Internet. And there is still, as I write, no BT Internet coming down my landline. Grrr. I feel like strolling up the road to ask the Openreach Men exactly when they expect to reconnect me. But it would do no good. I have little doubt that they are doing their best, and that yet another annoyed local resident giving vent to her feelings will not get the work done sooner.

Even so, it's a nuisance. It's like having your water, gas or electricity cut off, and it immediately makes life awkward. I still have the 4G Mobile Internet service on my phone (ironically also supplied by BT, using EE's network), but I'd prefer to use the big screen on my laptop.

I've known since 2012 - for the last eight years - that you can set one's phone up as a local Wi-Fi hotspot, and connect its 4G service to another device, such as one's laptop. But in 2012 that was a rigmarole, and it hammered the phone's battery, quite apart from gobbling up one's 4G Mobile Data allowance. So I didn't use it.

In the years since, my phones have had ever bigger batteries. And my data allowance has grown. I could have looked into regularly making my phone a temporary Wi-Fi hotspot in order to get the Internet on my laptop while on holiday - or if there are any outages at home. But memories of my 2012 experience put me off.

The present outage, however, spurred me to consider other ways of using my phone to get the Internet on my laptop while waiting for my home Wi-Fi to return.

I noticed that phone/laptop connectivity didn't have to be via Wi-Fi. You could use Bluetooth too. Hmm. That was still employing a juice-hungry radio method. But then I saw that I could simply link the two devices together with a USB cable - just as I do when getting photos off the phone, or back onto it after processing. All I had to do was to plug the cable into each device while they were 'on' and select the 'USB Tethering' option in the Connection menu (this was Android 9). A symbol then appeared on each screen, to tell me they were linked and that I could use the phone as an Internet gateway for the laptop.

As simple as that.

The job I particularly wanted to do was to back up the 1,250-odd documuents and spreadsheets in Dropbox (and therefore in the Cloud anyway) to a file on the laptop, which I'd then copy to an SD memory card that I keep separately. In this way, I would have two 'physical' backups plus the Cloud for my files - some of which are critical. I routinely do this every three days at home, using BT Broadband via my home router. Could I do it using BT 4G via my phone?

Oh, I could! There was no difference. The backup proceeded in the same way, and took about the same time. And scarcely a dent in either device's battery level.

This opens up wide possibilites. I can now be away from home and do things using my laptop, instead of always using just my phone. And quite a lot of things are best done on a large screen. It also solves the problem of making a comprehensive three-day 'physical' Dropbox backup when away from home, which I've had to forego so far, because it can't be done on the phone, only on the laptop. That's great news. And if I have the time, and there's something on that I really want to see, I can now use 4G to view 'laptop TV' in the caravan, once cable-connected to my phone. The same for blogging while on holiday.

This must have been possible for a long time past. And I didn't know. How daft is that?

This blog is therefore coming to you via 4G and Mobile Internet, but direct from my laptop.

Ha! My phone was showing 81% for its battery level a while back, and I thought it would go down to maybe 75% while editing this post for publication. But no. The phone has actually taken charge from the laptop, and now shows 86%. Meanwhile the laptop's battery has of course taken a hit, but I've now attached the power cable and it'll be fine.