Facetime able to use personal hotspot as the wifi needed?

Question

I have a Verizon iPhone 4. Although the personal hotspot works for providing wifi to my nearby iPad or a friends iPhone nearby, it does not appear that my phone, which generates wifi with it's hotspot recognizes it's own wifi and so is unable to use facetime. Facetime works fine using another wifi connection (home or hotel). Is my conclusion accurate? Is the self wifi generated by the personal hotspot not accesable by the phone generating it to enable facetime?

Answer 1

The problem is, for the 5 devices connected to the "personal hotspot" their internet connection is via wifi, so they meet the requirements for facetime. On your iPhone, the one creating the hotspot, our internet connection is via cellular data, which doesn't meet the requirements for facetime. Now, if you get your buddy to create a hotspot using his iPhone, you could use his connection and use face time as well.
Keep in mind that the reason for the wifi requirement is due to the volume of traffic that facetime transmits. You will be hard pressed to have enough bandwidth over a personal hotspot connection from an iPhone to sustain the traffic needed for facetime. I would expect that the carriers might soon press Apple to change the connection check to impose a certain bandwidth minimum before facetime can be used to prevent people from trying what you are describing, then having nothing but problems due to the limited connectivity speeds. Trying to "game the system" and having problems will cause plenty of people to complain when it doesn't work they way they want it to.