Host a wifi hotspot on Windows 8

If no Wifi, usb pen drive or network cable is available, it is sometimes useful to start a private Wifi hotspot on your computer.

This is achievable using the netsh tool.

Note: Usually a network card can be either used for receiving or sending a Wifi signal. Connecting to a wireless network and hosting another one at the same time is not possible.

Check if hosting a network is supported by the driver

If you execute the command

netsh wlan show drivers

on the command line, the response should contain the line

...
Hosted network supported  : Yes
...

If it does not, you are out of luck

Register a network

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=Horst key=111222333

register.bat

You can omit the key, but you should definitely add a password (even a short one).

Using the created network

To verify the status of the network

netsh wlan show hostednetwork

show_info.bat

To start the network

netsh wlan show hostednetwork

To stop the network

netsh wlan show hostednetwork

For convenience I added both starting and stopping to one batch script.
After a keypress, the wifi network is stopped again.

@ECHO OFF

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

PAUSE

netsh wlan stop hostednetwork

start_and_stop.bat