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I have a little different take: I understand her to say she has a working wi-fi pc, which she uses at home on her ISP network, she can also use it when out and about at free wi-fi hotspots. Her place of employment will NOT allow her to get on Their wi-fi network
What she is attempting to accomplish is the ability to get on the internet at work by creating her own wi-fi hotspot at work separate from theirs. ie: "Francine's network".
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Sorry for the confusion.
Your different take is correct. I think part of the problem is that you guys didn't understand what a "transport nurse" does. I travel in the school bus between the Bronx and Westchester with a disabled child to her school in the AM, and then later I accompany her home in the school bus. In between, there is something like 5 hours. The school does not make wifi available for anyone but the directors. I don't think there are many people working for that school who are over 35, and they all have smartphones, so I guess this doesn't matter much to them.
Today was the first day using my "personal hotspot." I DO have internet access on my laptop PC with this little device, manufactured for Virgin Mobile, and a month's worth of wifi service. This actually creates a wireless network just for me, wherever I am. The trouble is...I can't get a stable connection when viewing streaming videos, which are part of a school assignment. This mobile wifi is more like a dialup connection, to tell the truth, although it's supposed to be 3G. But it's still better than NO internet.
I posted here b/c I know you guys, and there are a lot of people here with technical knowledge far beyond mine, even though my G4 is presently not operational, and technically I am not right now a Mac user. It seems that most people don't know much about how to set up a personal wifi hotspot, and this surprises me. I only knew that it was possible. My sister sent me all sorts of links she found by googling "mobile wifi," to different kinds of devices, and I got mad at her, b/c she wasn't really giving me any kind of recommendation. The slick salesman at Radio Shack told me that those devices were routers, and that I didn't need them to set up a wifi hotspot. But who knows?
It's surprisingly difficult to get videos to stream properly on what is supposedly a "high speed" wireless network, much less from a mobile hotspot at times. There are so many variables, from actual connection speed, to whatever bandwidth is being taken up by however may users there may be on a wireless network at any given time... and there are a bunch of other factors at play as well. Our home network tests out at 2.1 MBPS download speed, but some streaming video is so content-rich it will not stream without buffering and stuttering. So it's not surprising to me that videos are not playing properly over a 3G network. And bear in mind, the minimum requirement for 3G is only .2 MBPS, or 200 KB per second, and that's only about 4 times faster than dial-up.
By the way, your phone should have some kind of indicator in the upper bar that would indicate whether you have a 3G connection... I think the only way my 3G phone might play videos without stuttering would be if the wireless data option is turned on and it could actually use a wireless network to handle the video content. All a long way of saying no matter what the guy at Radio Shack told you, it's difficult at best to get 3G to play with streaming video well.
It seems so backward to me that the school administrators won't let you use their network even though it's a part of your job. Bad on them!
Anyway, I hope that your injury heals fast and well, and that this will all be a faded memory in a few months. I wish I had a better solution for you, but as I understand what you've got going on with your hotspot, there's probably not much you can do unless you can find a wireless network to join with your phone... and then you probably wouldn't need it in the first place!
