ie8 fix
madison

Smartphones and Cell Phones

Matthew Miller
Home / News & Blogs / Smartphones and Cell Phones

Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug

By | June 2, 2011, 11:26pm PDT

Summary: Verizon continues to have growing pains with LTE and now it seems that the WiFi hotspot utility won’t run with the current time selected.

I like to use my Droid Charge as a LTE WiFi hotspot on the train, but as I was heading home last night the hotspot utility kept quitting on me. I tried multiple ways to get this running without any luck, even after rebooting my Charge. A quick search of my favorite Android sites revealed there was an apparent issue with the WiFi hotspot utility failing for all Android owners trying to use this utility. I still have not seen a single Verizon comment or acknowledgement of the issue.

I did find this post on Android Central where someone suggested resetting your time to 31 May or earlier and after I did that the hotspot utility worked just fine. There are supposed to be 2 weeks left in the free WiFi tethering trial period, but if Verizon cannot keep LTE up and running on these devices on a consistent basis I don’t see why anyone would ever pay for this lack of service.

Did you experience the outage and if so, did you set your time back to get it working until Verizon rolls out a fix?

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

More from “Smartphones and Cell Phones”

Topics

Verizon Communications Inc., Wi-Fi Hotspot, Matthew Miller, Wireless LANs, Wi-Fi, Wireless And Mobility

Matthew Miller started using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since.

Disclosure

Matthew Miller

Matthew is a professional naval architect by day and a mobile gadget freak at all other times. He purchases his own devices and then sells them on eBay or Craigslist to buy more. Many other devices are sent for review on a 30-day loaner basis and then returned to the carrier or manufacturer. If any are provided as “long term loaner units” this will be clearly disclosed in his reviews.

Biography

Matthew Miller

Matthew Miller started using a mobile devices in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since. He is a co-host with GigaOM's Kevin Tofel on the MobileTechRoundup podcast and an author of three Wiley Companion series books. Matthew started using mobile devices with a US Robotics Pilot 1000 and has owned over 125 different devices running Palm, Linux, Symbian, Newton, BlackBerry, iOS, Android, webOS, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone operating systems. His current collection includes an HTC Radar 4G, Dell Venue Pro, Apple iPad 2, HTC Flyer, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Nokia N9, Apple iPhone 4S, MacBook Pro, and many more, along with tons of accessories and classic devices like the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 and Sony CLIE UX50. Matthew can be found on various discussion forums under the user name of "palmsolo".
13
Comments
Add Your Opinion

Join the conversation!

Just In

RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
jackson1984-24316069205748857739440257893812 11th Oct
Beneficial chestnut ugg experience, various a number of many thanks toward the author. It truly is puzzling to me now, but normally, the usefulness and relevance is mind-boggling.
View in thread
0 Votes
+ -
Is the issue with Verizon, or with Android?
Mister Spock 3rd Jun
As there are no LTE versions of WP7 or iPhone it is hard to determine, though quite curious as to if this issue resides in Verizon's side, or the Android OS side of the technology.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
Peter Perry 3rd Jun
@Mister Spock I never had an issue with my LTE in Tampa so I don't know why he continues to have problems wiyh his even though he changed phones... I think it is where he lives.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
hwj@... 3rd Jun
Yep. It is true. I even went to Verizon office, they gave me a new phone. The rep at Verizon called their tech support who sggested a new phone. I knew it was a software problem. Well the solution of setting the date back works. I am using the hotspot right now after 2 days of dissappointment
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
hoaxoner 3rd Jun
Mine says it's connected, but won't process any information. Is that the problem you were having?
0 Votes
+ -
Contributr
Utility won't even launch
palmsolo (aka Matthew Miller) 3rd Jun
@hoaxoner Most of us are seeing the utility start up and then close immediately. If you try to go through the manual settings route you won't even see any response when you tap on Mobile Hotspot. Amazingly, Verizon STILL has no acknowledgement up or status on the problem!
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
techman0001 3rd Jun
Vzw responded to my question about it on twitter.....look at their vzwsupport handle....they responded once with their looking into it and then 6 hours later with an update that all top level techs are now working on the issue but they did not have an eta yet. So they did acknowledge it at least...
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
Bowler_z 3rd Jun
Just got my Charge yesterday and the hotspot app will not open.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
podstolom 3rd Jun
Serves Verizon right (at the consumer's inconvienience) that the HotSpot feature doesn't work right. That there is a date-related bug doesn't surprise me, as this app is rigged to function as a "free trial" subject to disablement after a certain date, which has already been extended once.

The fix to me seems obvious. Quit trying to monetize this "feature" as a gold-mine corporate cash cow, just as the rest of the world doesn't charge for tethering (even Canada doesn't for crying out loud) and just implement the standard Android .apk, and leave tethering alone to begin with. I would personally gladly forego "unlimited" data for caps in exchange for open tethering taken from the data allowance.

The funny thing is, VZW implements tethering just this way on tablets using the standard Android .apk, and I have yet to hear of hotspot issues on these devices.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
pearl street 5th Jun
OMG, thank you for shedding some light on this issue. I have had my Charge for 15 days now (1 day past the return policy limit) and I was trying to use the Mobile Hotspot App (not in WiFi mode, just through the LTE network) and the app wouldn't launch! I was cursing the phone, figuring that of course it would give me problems now that I cannot return it, all the while it is a VZ issue. I turned the date back as suggested and voila!! Get your $h!t together VZ, we're paying way too mucb for your service to be forced to deal with these amatuerish bugs!
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
james347 5th Jun
Not true.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
bigtee414 7th Jun
Thank you for posting this. I noticed that my hotspot feature on the charge stopped working last week. Contacted verizon (no mention of this widespread issue). They sent me a new Charge and guess what - same problem. Very frustrating.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
VZW_CS 11th Jun
A software update was released for the Charge on 6/9 to resolve this issue. The software update will be pushed over the next week.

Follow us on Twitter @VZWSupport
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Verizon suffers from date related LTE WiFi hotspot bug
jackson1984-24316069205748857739440257893812 11th Oct
Beneficial chestnut ugg experience, various a number of many thanks toward the author. It truly is puzzling to me now, but normally, the usefulness and relevance is mind-boggling.

Join the conversation!

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
ie8 fix
ie8 fix

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

Blog Roll

Blog Archive

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources
ie8 fix
ie8 fix