Wifi hotspot problems, chicken and egg issue

Question

Lovely internet goes down at the house - I know I can use my hotspot right?

1. Wifi on phone is dead because cable/internet is dead
2. Turn off wifi and browse using mobile data - YEA!!!
3. Lets try the hotspot feature!
4. Turn on hotspot, oh shit it requires wifi - so turn on wifi
5. I can connect my laptop right? YES! Connected!
6. But phone has gone back to State 1

Is there a simple way around this? Simple defined:

• Without deleting wifi connections (having to recreate them later)
• Without going around powering off all of my routers and access points (these are in rather inaccessible places)

Answer 1

You do not need to turn off Wi-Fi on your iPhone to be able to use it as a hotspot; you just need to have it unconnected to any Wi-Fi network.

Because we usually set up our phones to join our preferred Wi-Fi networks automatically, each connects to the respective Wi-Fi network even when the network is not connected to the Internet. I expect this automatic joining is the underlying cause of your problem.

To allow your iPhone to act as a hotspot under such conditions, turn off the auto-join for your preferred Wi-Fi network through the network’s settings on your iPhone and then turn off and turn on Wi-Fi on your iPhone. When the cable internet is back, just turn on the auto-join for the network.

Answer 2

I am assuming your phone is an iPhone here. Alper's answer is perfectly fine, but here is another possibility.

To allow hotspot, you cannot turn off WiFi completely - however, you can ask the phone to not connect to any network until tomorrow : in Control Center, just click on the WiFi icon. It should turn white instead of blue (if it turns to a striked-out icon, then your WiFi is off completely that is not good Maybe you are in plane mode). It will not try to reconnect to WiFi until tomorrow, but hotspot should still work. Hoping that tomorrow your cable is back on.