Moving is never fun. I was also in the process of moving and had two or so months when I was shuttling between both places, one of which was fully set up and the new place which was fairly barebones. To avoid paying for two internet service provider bills during the transition, I figured I would only use my mobile hotspot at the new place. Because I could not live without my daily “Ok Google, good morning” fix , I just had to get the Google mini connected in the new place. However I quickly realized that the Google Home mini could not be activated tethered to a Mobile hotspot. Here is how I got around this limitation.

I am detailing below the three step process I took to get everything working. Once completed the Google Home mini functions seamlessly connected to the Google Fi service on my Google Pixel2 phone. The only requirements are the phone with the mobile hotspot feature, the Google Home Mini and a laptop-in my case a Macbook Pro running OSX.

The Google Home mini cannot be setup tethered to a mobile hotspot

I am generally committed to the Google ecosystem and own a Google Home and a Google mini and also recently switched to a Google Pixel 2 phone with the Google Fi service.

Ever since I switched to Google Fi, I found myself tethering and using my data plan a lot more mostly because LTE speeds were often better than congested WiFi at public HotSpots and even sometimes at home.

I was also so accustomed to using my Google Home or Google mini several times a day, that I decided to move the Google home mini to the new place. I quickly realized that the Google home mini would not connect to the Mobile Hotspot on the Pixel 2 phone! Several posts on forums and other places confirmed that this was indeed the case and not particular to my setup.

After reading a little I considered solution 1: getting a cheap router to serve up my mobile hotspot from my phone via USB. Google mini I was sure would be able to connect to this router served up Wifi. After a little additional thought I realized this didn't make any sense-I would end up with an additional router, some additional expenditure to buy a router and many cheap routers didn't allow sharing of internet via USB. So decided to explore a “router” free setup process .

I then realized that if I can use my Macbook as a router, I could then connect the mini to the Macbook. For this, I would have the Mac connect to the Hotspot using USB and then setup “internet sharing” on the Mac.

I quickly realized that this would not work out of the box. Macs could only tether with Android using Wifi which was a no-go since the wifi adapter was to serve as the router part. I was about to give up but after some googling came across the HoRNDIS driver that enabled USB tethering with Android phones.

The three steps I took were:

Setting up the Macbook Pro to connect to the internet via USB-tethering Having my Macbook pro serve as a router ( remember , I am going for a “router free” solution) with the same SSID and password as my WIfi mobile hotspot Tricking the Google mini to connect directly to the phone mobile hotspot

Step 1 : Setting up the HoRNDIS driver on the Macbook Pro. The speeds attainable seem slower than Wifi tethering

The HoRNDIS driver was very easy to install as a standard package download and double click install. It did need me to allow the driver permissions to run in System Preferences.

After a quick install of HoRNDIS, I was able to connect my Macbook Pro to the internet via USB-c cable ( as shown in the screenshot above by the ‘<->’ symbol alongside the Pixel2 on the list of hardware devices on the left).

Macbook Laptop connected to Pixel 2 phone running HoRNDIS

Interestingly the speeds I could get via this were abysmal (blue bar in plot below) compared to via Android Mobile Wifi tethering or Xfinity wifi from Comcast.

Speed comparison of USB tethered vs WiFi tethered mobile hotspot

These slow “up” speeds made me rethink connecting the Google Home mini to this Macbook pro “router” since I wasn't sure if it would be able to stream music and podcasts at this speed.

Initially I tried to see if there was some way to improve these USB tethering speeds, but it seemed that the open HoRNDIS driver and mechanism it was using to connect to the phone was inherently slower in some ways. This led me to abandon using my Macbook as a router for my Home mini .

While I was researching this, I came across a post which detailed tricking the Home mini to use the Pixel 2 hotSpot by first using a “friends router” and having it mirror the Pixel 2 Hotspot name and Pixel 2 hotspot password. In this method , the mini would be setup with this bonafide router connection and then the connection replaced by swapping in the mobile hotspot with identical name and password authentication.

Since I didn't have a spare router I could use to do this, I decided to use my HoRNDIS solution with my Macbook Pro to serve as this router. Accordingly I set up internet sharing on my Macbook Pro as per these instructions. I made sure to call this shared internet connection the same as my Pixel2 hotspot.

One approach to having it connect to the Pixel2 hotspot is to have it connect to another Wifi end point with that same ID and password and then “trick” it into connecting to the mobile Hotspot when the short term Wifi end point goes away.

In my case I had no internet or router at the new place, so I could not even mock a Pixel_3755 end point at the new place. So I decided to create a Wifi hotspot out of my Macbook Pro , so that my mini would connect to the Internet a necessary step during the Google mini setup.

Step 2: Using the Macbook laptop as a router: Setting up internet sharing on the Macbook pro

The Macbook like any machine with two internet connection hardware can serve as a router. In this case I just setup the “served” internet connection via the USB connection to the Android Pixel 2 running Google Fi mobile hotspot. Next, I used the internet sharing ability of the Mac ( essentially its routing ability) in this Step 2.

On the Mac Go to System Preferences and click on on the “Sharing” icon ( its on the third row from the bottom). Check the Internet Sharing Box and on the right check the “Pixel 2” is selected in the “Share your internet connection” dropdown list. Then share “To the computers using” “Wifi” as shown in the screenshot below.

Setting up Macbook in “router” mode or enabling “Internet Sharing”

Step 3 : Trick the Google mini to connecting to the Mobile Hotspot by mirroring its configuration on the laptop in router mode.

The final step is to setup this “mock” Router with a configuration that matches exactly the Wifi mobile Hotspot setup on your Android phone as shown in the image below.

Match the access point name and password between phone and Macbook “router”

Once I set this up, I went ahead and had the Google mini connect to this Pixel_3755 access point with full access to the internet using the Google Home app on the Google Fi Phone. The setup should proceed without a hitch.

Next I stopped the Internet sharing on the laptop by toggling off the Wifi on the laptop or ending Sharing by unchecking the box in the “Sharing” section.

The Google home mini may complain briefly that it lost connection with Wifi.

Now in the final step I turned on the mobile hotspot on the Android phone. If I did everything correctly the Google Home mini should get tricked into connecting directly to the mobile hotspot on your Pixel 2 phone.

I was super thrilled when my Google Home Mini then directly connected to the Google Fi mobile hotspot running on my pixel2. One more step to saying Goodbye to my cable modem ISP.