It all sounds reasonable, and way too much to ask the typical user to do.

Lee Badman | Network Architect
Information Technology Services
206 Machinery Hall
120 Smith Drive
Syracuse, New York 13244
t 315.443.3003   f 315.443.4325   e [email protected] w its.syr.edu
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
syr.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Julian Y Koh
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2015 10:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] iPhone hotspots that are on when off.

On Fri Aug 28 2015 08:48:09 CDT, Lee H Badman <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> So I reached out again, and she assured me that it’s turned off. So I took my 
> curiosity to The Google. It turns out a lot of people have already noticed 
> that “No” doesn’t mean “No” when it comes to Apple’s iPhone hotspots. It 
> actually means “we’ll show you that it’s off, but other devices can turn it 
> on”.

I think there's a little bit of nuance that might be getting missed here.

My feeling is that the root cause of all of this is related to the 
Handoff/Continuity feature set that was introduced with Mac OS X Yosemite and 
iOS 8.  

<http://www.apple.com/osx/continuity/>

These features use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct and AppleIDs to link your devices 
together to be able to do things like have your laptop and iPad turn on the 
personal hotspot on your phone (among other things like use your laptop/iPad to 
receive and make calls through your phone, relay text messages, start composing 
an email or reading a web page on one device and pick up on another, etc etc).

So yes, the advice to turn off Bluetooth will definitely stop the behavior from 
happening, but I think one other piece is to tell the laptop not to remember 
all the Wi-Fi networks that it has connected to (or change the priority of 
remembered networks such that the hotspot SSID is lower in priority than your 
university network).  Or in the case of the iPad, have it forget the network 
sourced by the personal hotspot.  That way, if the laptop/iPad can't connect to 
any of its other configured networks, it won't then fall back to try to 
activate the hotspot on the phone.  

I haven't tested this exhaustively, but that's the best hypothesis I can come 
up with based on a description of the issue and the configurations of my own 
devices.  

-- 
Julian Y. Koh
Associate Director, Telecommunications and Network Services
Northwestern University Information Technology (NUIT)

2001 Sheridan Road #G-166
Evanston, IL 60208
847-467-5780
NUIT Web Site: <http://www.it.northwestern.edu/>
PGP Public Key:<http://bt.ittns.northwestern.edu/julian/pgppubkey.html>





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