Wireless printing in a non-intern​et enviroment

Question

I recently purchased a HP Laserjet Pro P1102w, because I need to print in a location that doesn't have wireless, but does have cellular (and thus I get internet through a tethered cell phone).
The printer easily went onto cloudless printing at my home on my DSL wireless, and I have full configuration power thru USB or 192.168... ...
The problems arise when I remove the home DSL wireless. I've tried two solutions:
1) tether the printer to my cell phone, and use cloud print like normal. Incredibly slow, but would accomplish what I needed.
2) wirelessly Direct Print to the printer from my chromebook (or cell phone).
1) Tethering the printer to the cell phone:
All of my other devices [(apple laptop - where the tether shows up under the wireless icon as a device, but the apple laptop connects just fine), chromebook and first gen iPad] connect to the cell phone no problem .
Can't get the printer to associate to save my life. No encryption, using Barnacle Wi-fi on a T-Mobile HTC One.
Even when the cell phone is broadcasting its SSID, the SSID does not show up under the available wireless networks list on the printer configuration webpage, and if I add it manually, it doesn't work.
2) Direct wireless printing:
So I thought a better solution would be to use Direct Wireless Printing. No problem, all my devices happily associate with the printer and print fine, when I'm at home and the printer booted up associated with my home wireless DSL.
As soon as I take away the home wireless DSL, the printer's web server, DHCP server et. al.  become inaccessable.
The printer's wireless light (blue LED) blinks endlessly when booting up, and never becomes solid. It's like the printer needs an overarching wireless network to get its own DCHP information from, and only then will it become a working print server/DHCP server on its own.
Is this a bug? Known behavior? It seems the whole point of Direct Wireless Printing (like IR printing before it) would be to print without an external network.
Any thoughts? A solution I haven't tried? A trick to get the printer to associate with a tethered cell phone, or a way around the Direct Wireless Printing problem?

Answer 1

Hi allochthon,
HP wireless direct printing is a feature that allows you to print directly to your HP printer without a network, using a direct peer to peer wireless connection. You can use this feature on a Laptop/Desktop or mobile device.
From the Laptop/Desktop or mobile device you connect directly to the printer's network and be able to print.
Since you would be connected directly to the printer's network and not your network, you wouldn't have the internet access until disconnecting from the printer's network and connecting back to your network again.
Using the printer with a tethered cell phone may or may not work. Most likely it would be very intermediate.
I would suggested connecting to the network, then finding your print jobs, then reconnect back to the printer's wireless direct and then printing them in this kind of environment.
If you had a router and connected the printer to that network, you could have all the devices connected to the same network name and be able to print and also be on the internet at the same time and print also.
If the Wireless Direct isn't enabled on the printer, then uninstall and reinstall the printer software on the Laptop, during the installing select to Enable the Wireless Direct.
Thank You.
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Gemini02
I work on behalf of HP