How to Use Your Samsung Galaxy Smartphone as a WiFi Repeater

As trivial as it sounds, the internet plays a significant role in our daily lives. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to deal with slow WiFi. It can affect your gaming experience, content streaming and most importantly, your workflow.

What if I told you there is an easy way to improve your WiFi signal without having to invest in any additional equipment? In fact, you’ve had the solution in the palm of your hands. I’m talking about any flagship Samsung Galaxy smartphone released in recent years.

What's a WiFi repeater?

A wireless repeater is a device that can extend the range of your Wi-Fi network. It works by picking up the existing Wi-Fi signal from your router and retransmitting it. This creates a second Wi-Fi network in your home, which you can connect to with any devices that support Wi-Fi.

The best way to think about a wireless repeater is as an extension cord for your router. It doesn’t add any new features or capabilities, but it makes sure that all of the devices in your home can connect to the internet without having to move closer to the router. Fortunately, this feature is built-in with most Galaxy flagship devices.

Samsung's Software

Since Touchwiz days, Samsung has always been known to pack as many features as possible on a smartphone. A few of these features may be gimmicky; however, there are many useful settings that can provide solutions to specific case scenarios, such as extending a WiFi network.

Fun fact: Touchwiz was Samsung’s discontinued user interface. It’s now replaced by One UI which runs on the latest Galaxy devices.

How to extend/boost WiFi signal with your Samsung phone

Step 1: Switch on WiFi and connect to a network

Step 2: Turn off mobile data

You don’t want your Galaxy device to share mobile data. Make sure to turn it off.

Step 3: Go To settings

A quick way to access settings is by pulling the notification bar and clicking on the spinning gear in the top right corner.

Step 4: Click Connections

Step 5: Click Mobile Hotspot and Tethering

Step 6: Click Mobile hotspot

Step 7: Set Network name and password

You’ll see an option to select either the 5 GHz band or 2.4 GHz. The higher band will work better, but if you have a lot of older devices, it’s recommended to use the 2.4 GHz band.

Step 8: Connect to your new WiFi

Use another device to connect to the new WiFi network.

Why is this feature impressive?

Compared to iPhones, this feature is non-existent in the iOS operating system. The latest iPhones should be capable of WiFi to WiFi hotspot, but Apple hasn’t yet allowed it. The only way to re-transmit and extend WiFi on an iPhone is by jailbreaking the device. Who knows though, Apple might implement it in the future.

What is the best location to place your Galaxy smartphone to extend WiFi

Newer Galaxy phones are really good at catching WiFi. I find where other devices struggle, my Galaxy S21 Ultra does a great job of retaining fast download/upload speeds. To extend such speeds to all devices, it’s just a matter of turning on hotspot. It works pretty well, especially for devices located in dead zones or far away from the router.

The closer you place the phone to the router, the stronger the hotspot.

Scenarios where your Galaxy smartphone can be used to extend WiFi

Tenants who live in basement apartments and share WiFi with upstairs tenants usually complain about WiFi. Depending on where the router is placed, some devices experience extremely slow WiFi. But having the option to extend WiFi with your smartphone is a neat feature and a cost-effective solution.
You can extend WiFi to devices located outdoors.

Since hotspot creates a whole new WiFi network, you can use it to share WiFi with friends without having to reveal the password of your main WiFi network. Of course, many routers already have a guest WiFi option, but not all tenants have access to the routers’ administrator settings.