It's not often I have a whole Friday and Saturday without a gig of some description - I've been enjoying it. I don't much like the busy city on a Saturday night and IMO Fridays are less crowded but have a higher proportion of dunderheads.
While I haven't had a gig to mix I can think of 3 people from different companies that have asked me to help them with problems connecting a tablet via a router to a digital mixer in the last few days. To me this is an IT skill and a basic one, not something you first call a sound engineer about, but that's how it goes - I suppose when you're on the spot with the clock ticking and something doesn't work, the person you call is whoever you know with experience on the same equipment. As I posted, we did pick up a new SQ7 and the boss asked me to get it and the router working with my tablet, but other calls came from working live engineers who I would have thought should have known about this stuff.
At my weekly gig they use a Soundcraft Ui24 for extra IEM sends and there's an Apple Airport to connect to it. Those mixers do have their own hotspot but the range is tiny, maybe 5 paces, so it's usual to use an external router. And because the company renting the venue the equipment has always used Apple since the early 80's, they've always tried to use Apple hardware whenever possible. IMO using a device that's been out of production for years, just because it's the brand you like, is not best practice. Esp. since the same company has a new installation going in, of their oldish gear (Nexo Alpha), for a venue they just had to choose and buy a new WiFi router and I recommended a Netgear model. Just a common type you can get at many retailers, about $150 AU (~US $90).
The Airport at the venue in town suddenly dropped out today, while they were there doing some maintenance on the PA itself, and would not talk to the iPad. To me it sounds like user error - did someone accidentally turn WiFi off on the iPad, or something like that - but it's possible that this >10 year old consumer device finally died. New WiFi routers from reputable brands are cheap, all the more reason to steer away from old gear. In digital and networking terms, that thing is ancient.
It's a pretty basic networking case - one router, providing a link between one tablet and one digital mixer. You might even have more than one tablet / phone / etc controlling one IEM send each via that same router but it's still only dealing with very low bandwidth links by today's standards - kilobytes per second at the most, if it's displaying RTA output, and typically less than that.
I don't know what the outgoing house engineer and the incoming temporary guy worked out between them - that band on Saturday nights uses 5 IEM sends and depends on them being available - but I'm glad I didn't get any frantic phone calls during the night