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Help Portable hotspot on Xperia Z3 Compact not working, completely

R

rsinsanjose

Lurker
I bought the Z3 Compact in December, 2014. Everything seems to be working great, except for
one critical feature: Portable Hotspot.

Summary of the problem: The phone connects to the internet through the carrier, T-Mobile, but
connecting to the phone from a device like a laptop to surf the web ONLY WORKS FOR GOOGLE
PAGES, e.g. Gmail.com, news.google.com, maps.google.com. I can't surf to any other website, like
Yahoo.com, cnn.com, etc.

I first contacted T-Mobile because I thought it was a problem with network routing, or account
settings. Found no issues there, and as a test they told me to go to a T-Mobile store
and put my SIM card in one of their phones. They did this with an iPhone and the hotspot worked.

Then I contacted Sony and the only things they've said are to do a factory reset, or a software repair,
or wait for the Lollypop update. I haven't tried the first two because it will wipe my phone and I'll
have to do all the re-configuration and re-installation of apps. And I'm not confident it will help.

Some technical details: My laptop is a MacBook Air with Lion. I also have an older MacBook Pro
with Snow Leopard. I get the same problem on both computers. The crazy thing is, when I'm
connected to the phone's hotspot, I can't surf to a non-Google website, but I can connect to it
using telnet! For example, I run "telnet yahoo.com 80" and I get the "connected" prompt.

So it seems like something is selectively blocking web traffic that goes to non-Google sites.
If this is an Android problem, then I would guess that others have seen this problem.

I'm looking for some confirmation of this problem, and I especially need some suggestions
on how to fix it.

Thanks!
 
Hi @rsinsanjose and welcome to Android Forums :)

I've moved your thread into the subforum specific to the Z3 Compact so that it can be seen by fellow users. That way we can see if anyone else has encountered a similar issue or has a fix. :thumbsupdroid:

Good luck!
 
Try changing the users agent on the browser that may fix your issue.

Because the phone is unlocked and on t-mobile is likely the issue.
 
Thanks, @DirtyDee. I tried changing the user agent in both browsers and it did not
help. I'm still limited to being able to only surf Google pages.

I'm waiting for the pending Android update to reach my phone. But it might still
be a few more weeks, the Sony website is very vague. I also need to try having a Windows
computer connect to my phone, and also go to a T-Mobile store again and have them
put my SIM card into another Andoid phone, not an iPhone.

Any other suggestions?
 
Well, as I expected, it was a problem with Android. It apparently was a bug that
Google and others were not admitting. The Android update for 5.0.2 finally became
available for my phone and as soon as I installed it and tested the hotspot, it worked.
It works exactly like it's supposed to work.

So does anyone know how I can get a portion of my phone and service fees back
from Google for providing defective software??

-RS
 
Hi RS,

I'm glad you got the hotspot function working, and quite sorry that it took so long!. :)

Keep in mind, though, that Google isn't responsible for updating/patching/fixing the software on your Sony device. Google provides Sony with the Android 5.0.2 code in the form of the Android Open Source Project, and also allows the OEM to include certain Google services in the build, but Sony is ultimately responsible for tailoring the code for your device.

Whether the issue was widespread so that no Z3 Compacts could use the portable hotspot feature or limited to just a few devices, if it was a software problem the onus would have been on Sony to fix it for you - not Google. (By the way, others seem to have had the feature working on their Z3 Compacts before the 5.0.2 update - based on posts like these.)

So if it wasn't a widespread problem, and it wasn't an actual fix in the 5.0.2 update itself, I'm guessing that the update process may have helped - particularly clearing and rebuilding the phone's cache. It's possible that some configuration had become corrupted for some reason and the rebuilding the cache resolved the problem. For what it's worth, either the software repair or factory reset that Sony had recommended probably would have cleared it up as well.
 
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