I take this to mean that you have “cellular data” turned off on your phone so any data-driven phone activity (email, text, browsing, etc.) MUST be coming via the wifi connection, and that this phone activity continues normally while your computer’s network-based activity doesn’t.
As you are probably aware, the router connects to the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) user side connector with a single wired ethernet connection. All the data for all the devices using the wifi goes back and forth over this connection. So if the ISP or the router hardware fails for some reason, every device trying to use the wifi connection will fail. On the other “side” of the router there are multiple wireless “connections”, one for each device using the wifi. It’s entirely possible for one of these connections to fail for certain reasons (rendering the associated device’s internet connection inoperative), while the other devices using the wifi are unaffected. This appears to be what’s happening to you.
Two possibilities come to mind; there are probably others.
- Some kind of IP address conflict between your computer and the router; ie your computer is trying to use an IP address that the router has assigned to some other device or is outside the address range the router is configured to use. This would make it impossible for your computer to do anything on either the Wide Area Network (WAN) ie. internet or your Local Area Network (LAN) ie. file or printer/scanner sharing.
- Your router has been configured to prevent internet access for the IP address your computer is using. This is called “parental control” on many routers. This would result in no WAN access for your computer but would not affect its LAN access, so you could continue file sharing and printing.
Why either of these conditions would be initiated by Rhino is a complete mystery to me, which is why I said “there are probably others”.
I certainly hope you get it resolved and wish you good luck.