Internet Sharing: An amazing solution that's very underrated

the breaker tripped overnight which means no wifi. that's amazing! there's gotta be a solution though, right? in fact, how am I even writing this? good question.

it's all got to do with internet sharing, a heavily underrated feature of macs.

however, our broadband was not down. so you know what this means...

i'm using a macbook pro with only 2 usb-c ports and a headphone jack, but what is there not? an ethernet port!

luckily, i have a usb-c to ethernet port that can deliver speeds of up to 10/100/1000 mbps...perfect! that will be amazing. in fact, this macbook pro runs on a broadcom chip...i can't tell you how amazing those are! (except for linux support...besides the point...)

anywho. how’d i get the wifi network working? well, i’m connected to this mac through a wired cable (ethernet) and there’s a little lesser-known feature of macOS called internet sharing…it does exactly what you think it does. Shares the internet.

so i set that up with USB 10/100/1000 LAN (yes, that's what it's called) and set it to advertise on wifi (with a password ofc!) and that worked! now (almost) every device in our home has wifi! well, this comes to the end of the article.

this is a very cursed solution, and i would not recommend it unless you want desperately, wifi! but i think only apple sillicon macs have this, because my old 2016 macbook air that i installed omarchy on ...well, it wasn't working as a hotspot (i tried for hotel airplay...hotel wifi blocks ports on devices or something??). probably because there is no driver support for that yet?

cool, amazing...whatever. if you need wifi, here's a solution. or just use your hotspot, ofc. (i did this bc i'm lazy)

and also, there is probably limits to how many people can join the wifi. my first shot doing this, connecting my phone to the wifi said "unable to join" but who knows? maybe it's just an apple problem or something. (it's mac [w/ M chip] to iphone!!!)

anywho, it's now what you have been waiting for, speed tests!!! but before you get on with that...drumroll please...a poll!

okay...thanks for answering! (that is, if you did.) and over ethernet, on the macbook...

that's amazing! it's definitely faster than I expected. our home wifi is about ~500-700 mbps...depending on load. and what's the lesson for this article? always use ethernet.

goodbye

(EDIT: That was wasteful. As of July 21st, 2026, at 9:28 am, internet services have been restored.)