Same! And the best thing is that you can install Tailscale, so you can connect to your tailnet, and exit all traffic through one of your nodes (e.g., your home/office network).
It's incredibly useful, with the added bonus that you don't need to install tailscale client in any of your travel devices (phone, tablet, work computer, etc).
I’m seeing a lot of this same comment here, so I went to check out this tailscale thing, which clearly I must need.
Can anybody explain what Tailscale is, does, or why everybody seems to have it?
Looking at their website, it’s just a huge wall of business jargon. Really! Read it. It’s nothing but a list of enterprise terminology. There’s a “how it works “ page full of more (different) jargon, acronyms and buzzwords, but no simple explanation of why everybody on this thread seems to be paying money for this thing?
Any help? Should I just pay them my $6/month and hope I figure it out at some point?
We’re from the US but were recently in Germany. Sometimes we were completely exhausted after a long day and just wanted to rest in our room a little before going to sleep. Our motel had like 2 English speaking channels and both sucked. We watched a lot of German TV because it was interesting, even if we could barely understand what was going on. After some time doing that, it was a pleasure watching some Hulu, courtesy of connecting to WireGuard back at our house in California so that we had an American IP.
These are neat in that you can jump on and extend existing wifi infra, but it'd be nice if they also included 5G. I want a product that does both.
It's cool to have your own network in a hotel. But it'd be nice to be able to do that on the road, away from public wifi, internationally, whenever - which hotspots do. But at the same time, it'd be nice to be able to do the WiFi thing too to cut back on data usage. I frequently blow through my hotspot data.
I'd rather this be in one device instead of two. Beggars can't be choosers, though, I suppose?
I do want to point out that dumping all of your traffic through a home/office network is not always a good idea. YMMV, but if you are in, say, LA, and pushed your 0.0.0.0 traffic through your home in NY, you just added quite a bit of latency.
This is great for keeping things in a LAN, but make sure you use your network rules correctly and don’t dump everything to your home network unless you need to.
(I too have a gli slate, but I use UI at home so will consider this when it comes out)
Is this any better than just doing Hotspot with wifi bridge? I just have my hotspot on my pixel for my devices to connect to. Pixel itself is connected to whatever
"public wifi" is there.
Your hotspot just makes the untrusted hotel wifi available via your phone wifi. The networks between your computer and your target services can still inspect and alter your data. Tailscale, or more specifically the Wireshark underneat, sets up an encrypted tunnel so those "untrusted" intermediate networks can't do that.
In my experience hotels throttle wifi connection per device (IP/Mac address or whatever) and so you'd be better off using something that can use the wired connection in your room (which is usually unthrottled or has higher bandwidth) and be an AP for your personal devices.
If you don't have a wired connection then this wouldn't be any better, except for any connectivity features it might offer (probably some vpn capability).
I have a gl-inet device and it does pretty much all I need whenever I travel.
Heartily seconded! A friend recommended I get one and now I push all my other technical friends to buy one, too.
My wife and I traveled a bit this year and it was great having all our gadgets connecting to a single AP under our control. It’s easily paid for itself by avoiding ludicrous per-device daily charges.
I think most travel APs can generally do this, but the feature that makes GL.iNet products popular is: extensibility. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers, but making products useful via extensibility is a sure fire way to open your target market directly up to prosumers. And those are the buyers that will find you.
I own two of their products, one of them I bought in 2019 and can still run what I need to on it.
I'm not using it for travel, but I got a GL-BE3600 recently and it's surprisingly decent as a home router for my very specific needs.
I wired the desktop PCs in the house, so the only Wi-Fi users are mobiles, a smart TV, and a laptop. Everything else is already hanging off 2.5G wired switches. Pretty light duty, and I just wanted something that would provide robust routing and placeholder Wi-Fi. This does exactly that, and since it's OpenWRT based, it's probably marginally less terrible than whatever TP-Link was offering in the same price range.
It does run annoyingly hot, but I should just buy a little USB desk fan and point it at the router :P
I've had very impressive success running upstream OpenWRT on TP-Link hardware: I have Archer C7 access points running with literally years of uptime.
That being said, for any new application, I suggest using at least an 802.11ax AP, because cheap 2.4GHz devices that support 802.11ax are becoming common and using an 802.11ac router means that your 2.4GHz devices will be stuck with 802.11n, which is quite a bit less efficient. Even if you don't need any appreciable speed, it's preferable to use a more efficient protocol that uses less airtime.
This rarely works. The TV network is usually access controlled, so you either won't get an IP or you simply won't have internet access.
Some hotel rooms (particularly older business hotels) will have an ethernet port for the guest. These work maybe 50% of the time these days. Sometimes you can find a Ruckus AP in your room at outlet level, and these usually have several ethernet ports on the bottom. These also have a working port around 30% of the time.
So, TL;DR: various ethernet ports in hotel rooms work less than half the time these days.
I could never figure out which gl-inet to get, since some of the newer products seemed less powerful than older ones depending on the product family or something...
> some of the newer products seemed less powerful than older ones
Cynic in me thinks it's because they don't want you to buy one product and be set for a decade, like HN-er here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46373387. Older products might've been too good.
While on a scuba diving trip in Thailand a couple months ago we could position the router slightly outside our hotel room to be able to be able to strongly connect to the very dodgy hotel wifi so my girlfriend could do her work calls.
It would also automatically log into the captive wifi which seemed to require a login every hour or so.
Another time we Ethernet into it using the cable in another hotel to bypass some ridiculous speed limitations on their access point.
I'm considering getting their model which can take SIM cards, so that we can also failover to mobile networks wherever we are.
I was thinking of using that in combination with Beelink ME Mini N150 with proxmox installed on it and host different net tools, git, etc that’s available on the go. I might be overthinking the setup
Run one wireguard server in your home and one client instance on this router and now all of your devices can share the same residential VPN connection. No fraud blocks or extra verifications from your banking apps, no million suspicious login detected from all your social accounts, use your home netflix account, etc. All without your individual devices running a VPN app.
chromecast - godsend on long hotel stays. need to dial in through my home (wireguard) so no license issues with streamers and once I connect my GL.iNet GL-MT300N-V2 to hotel wifi instant bubble of safe wifi for all my devices! weighs nothing, been using for 8 years rock solid.
Usually you connect your laptop/phone to the portable router network, which then just pulls up the captive portal. Once you auth from one device, any device behind the router is authed with the portal. This is because the hotel network just sees your router's IP/MAC.
Connect on your phone or other device. Connect to travel router. Clone the mac address of your device. Connect router to wifi. Adjust device to not auto login. Good to go.
The Beryl AX is going for cheaper ($70) on Amazon right now vs the UniFi Travel Router ($80). Better bang for the buck on both hardware and software without needing specific Ubiquiti anything.
The UniFi router depends on you already having a UniFi environment. If you do, it's a good option, but the GL would work with any heterogeneous network
When you are some place with a captive network and want to use devices that don’t have a browser. You connect the router to the WiFi network that has internet access and you connect the other WiFi network to a device with a browser like your phone. Every device looks like one device to the captive network and you can use them all.
Second use case, I now live in a place with a shared internet access that is shared between all of the units. Anyone can broadcast to and control our Roku device and there is no way to block it from the Roku.
One is actually usable wifi at hotels with ethernet cables available. I don't use that device, but a DIY version that also acts as a portable media server while traveling. We can tunnel back to our home network, but often stay places with very bad reception and or internet access. Also helps keep the kids entertained on longer road trips. They can connect their devices to the router as we travel and have full access to the cached media.
I always travel with my GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX) and this is what I use it for:
- My wife and I travel with multiple devices (laptops, phones, Chromecast...) and when we get to a hotel/Airbnb, I simply connect my Beryl AX to their network (it deals with captive portals btw) and all of our devices automatically connect.
- I changed the `/etc/hosts` directly in the router, meaning I can test my local servers under custom domains easily on my other devices like phones/tablets without apps like SquidMan.
- I route specific domains through specific VPNs. Government websites, streaming websites, AWS services, etc.
- I can plug in a 4G USB modem into it and it can automatically fallback to it if the main connection drops.
When I travel, I like carrying as little as possible. These comments are fascinating to me, people are brining more devices than I have in my whole house and needing to make a LAN for them.
Personally I just connect my phone to WiFi and then use Tailscale and call it a day.
It's really dependent upon the expected downtime at the hotel for me. I do about 150 nights in hotels a year.
Some of those trips I'll have extended time of 18+ hours of not really doing anything outside of the hotel other than grabbing dinner. For those types of trips I'm definitely more apt to bring additional devices like my GLinet travel router and MAYBE a streaming stick. I've also brought RPis or MCUs for tinkering during my downtime.
However, other trips I'm with you. I bring my phone, laptop, iPad (required for job), and chargers and that's about it for devices. I really try to limit my packing to things I know I will use and honestly for probably 50% of my travel that's clean clothes, toothbrush, phone, and wallet.
My travel I describe above is solo, work related. When the family comes we tend to tow a 9,000 lbs condo on wheels, so literally the "kitchen sink".
Over time, I've taken less and less stuff. I still take my iPad in a keyboard case for longer trips, and as a backup for 2FA incase something happens to my phone, but now I mostly feel like my phone alone is "good enough." Doomscrolling on the phone works just as well on the road as at home :).
I do load my phone up with eBooks for unexpected downtime, and I do have an emulator on it. I would not chose to use my phone for reading or gaming normally, but on the road it's "good enough" - jack of all trades, master of none.
Of course if I'm traveling for work my work laptop comes, but I never put personal accounts on it.
The only trips I've been on with 18+ hours of down time were due to weather events (getting snowed in on a ski trip). That was with a big group. We just played card games, cooked, talked, and consumed copious amounts of alcohol to pass the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
For me, I can't remember the last time I used a hotel TV. When I travel, I want to do stuff at the place I'm visiting, the hotel room is just a place to sleep and shower.
If I do want to watch something, I much prefer the experience of my much nicer TV and surround sound system at home. That said, I don't watch much TV, so maybe this is easier for me.
If I have downtime when I travel, I tend to just read, or do the same thing I do at home - doomscrolling news, reddit, HN :)
My "family" is multiple devices. M networks (hotel, airport, lounge) and N devices means O(M * N) wifi setups, so carrying a known 200g router means I only have to do O(M+N) setups.
But yeah I also have P family so O(M * P * N) would be a headache.
I have a dedicated travel AppleTV for this. AppleTV is great at hotel captive portals (forwarding the web page to your phone). I am already logged into all my streaming apps, including my home DVR (ChannelsDVR).
Depends a lot on the travel, yes? If I’m going to be out on the town a lot for a couple of days, I’m traveling light. If I’m going to be somewhere for a week and know I’m going to need a lot of decompression time playing Animal Crossing back at the motel, I’ll pack for that instead.
I'm not sure there's a dichotomy. I travel for a week at a time across the country, and bring only a backpack that fits under the seat on the airplane. But there's a GL.iNet router in that bag, since it gives all my devices Mullvad + Tailscale. Good use of space in my opinion, since I can access all the services I host from my home 3000 miles away with zero extra config.
As a someone who has traveled for work more days in the year than not, I'd much rather not require yet another device to carry and deploy in an ever changing network environment.
The multi-uplink is intriguing. While on the surface it seems that an ostensibly 'plug and play' carrier aggregation dongle (no idea if this is actually a feature) would be a easy solution to smooth out poor connections, many networking hiccups encountered during travel just boil down to impossibly terrible RF environments, regardless of the spectrum or protocol.
I did 82 days last year. Everyone travels different, but for me I feel like any time I spend watching TV in the hotel is wasted time - I'm in a whole other city, surely there's something I can do? The hotel is just somewhere to take a shower and sleep. I don't watch much TV in general though so I guess it's easier for me.
If this thing can circumvent the China firewall reliably and broadcast non-firewalled Wi-Fi in my hotel room for all my devices so that I don't have to set up VPN on each one, they absolutely have my business.
However I don't think Unifi's default protocols are useful for that. To get reliable performance over China's firewall, you need plausibly-deniable obfuscated protocols, e.g. encoding all your packets inside a stream of requests of JPEGs of cat pictures over HTTP port 80 or some such.
I used to have a UniFi gateway for the nice traffic visualization but Ubiquiti lost my trust when they started running telemetry without consent and I’ve gone back to an OpenBSD’s box as router, thus this device does little for me.
I’m looking forward to the GL.Inet MUDI 7, their first 5G hotspot, which should be running an open-source and hackable OS unlike most hotspots:
To all the commenters who asked if it's worth it? IMO it's super worth it if you have more than one wifi access point and it gets more and more worth it as your network gets more complicated.
I upgraded to homogenous ubiquiti/unifi when I set up a point to multi-point on my farm because I thought it would make that part easier. Surprisingly, those links aren't really baked in to the rest of it, but the router and wifi antennas that I've installed around those links "just work" with a private, protected, and guest network.
I used to have to update two different routers with the same SSID, username and password to make "hopping" from one to the next "seamless" and, now that I've got 8 wifi antennas in a mesh with a single UI to configure them all, I can't even imagine how I'd do it with the hodge-podge of gear I used to work with.
And I'm probably going to buy a travel router, but I'm wondering, if I use it connect to the hotel wifi, will I be able to use the thing as a wifi hotspot as well or do I have to use an ethernet point because the wifi is "taken"?
So… hear me out. Could I connect this to an airline’s paid in-flight WiFi network, and then broadcast an open network to effectively open up access to all other passengers for free? If enough WiFi pirates do this on flights perhaps it would kill paid WiFi entirely (just need enough Good Samaritans)
(And yes I know there are other bypasses you can do like spoofing MAC addresses to get around some device count restrictions)
“Soon”? Why would they give up that money though? I feel like there’s so little competition they aren’t feeling the pressure. Otherwise everyone else would have been hurting 15+ years ago when JetBlue started their free Wi-Fi.
Maybe. And then get throttled or banned for using too much bandwidth. You don't need this product to do this though, you can do the same thing with a laptop and your phone
Why would this kill paid wifi? A bunch of airlines are already switching to free wifi anyways, but the ones that aren't seem unlikely to just kick back as an army of easily-identifiable tech bros attempt to defraud them. It's a bit like trying to steal money from the bank after you've handed them your ID and debit card.
This is brilliant, actually very innovative product by Unifi. It's interesting because it seems they do what Apple does: they can add new products and features only because all the devices work together in an ecosystem.
The way it automatically connects to your home and presents to your devices as part of your home WiFi. So you bring that device with you and everything else works like you're back home.
I use OPNSense and OpenWRT myself and there's no way you can make travel routers this convenient with them.
I run OpnSense, Wireguard, hooked up to third party WiFi access points, and I had to do a lot of configuration and work that I wouldn't have had to do if I had just bought Ubiquiti equipment.
I did save money, a really significant amount of money.
Obviously, yes, I am capable of going through the work that eliminates my need for this product. I have no trouble configuring Wireguard and setting it up on my client devices and running through all that.
But it was a lot of work to get to this point and I had to spend a lot of time learning how to do that, even as a person who is already technical. Wireguard in particular took me a solid half a day to build understanding and get it configured.
If I was a little bit richer and I went back in time I'd probably just buy all Unifi. Actually if I went back in time I think with my same levels of wealth I'd probably just buy Unifi and save some precious time.
This specific device does seem like a really nice extension of their product line.
I’m in the market for a solid travel router, and my home network is all Unifi gear. This is a no brainer, especially with the built-in Teleport support.
Not to take away from this device, I think it’s pretty neat. But you can run tailscale on anything, even Apple TVs. If you have a Unifi network odds are that you have at least one spare computing device that can run tailscale.
Wifi 5 for an $80 router in 2026 (I mean we're almost there) is pretty disappointing. I get that its mostly going to be used on crappy hotel networks and the crappy hotel network will often be the bottleneck but $80 looks to be roughly twice the price of the typical travel wifi 5 travel router, about equal to the price of a typical wifi 6 travel router, and only $30-40 cheaper than a typical wifi 7 travel router.
I don't mind a unifi premium for the integration but they should at least have a $50 wifi 5 version and a $100 wifi 6 "pro" version
I don't think they necessarily compete for the same market as some of these other routers. This seems way more compact than many of the other options on the market. I just briefly looked around on Amazon and even many other wifi 5 routers look to be about 2x or thicker than this one. Compared to the GL.inet Opal for example, it's about 20mm smaller in each dimension: 118 x 85 x 30mm (Opal) vs. 95.95 x 65 x 12.5 mm (Unifi). The Unifi is pretty close to a tiny 5000 mAh portable battery.
Now what I'd be really more interested in a Pro version, more so than wifi 6, would be a built-in modem with SIM/eSIM.
Wonder how this will work to connect into hotel networks - on my glinet I have to clone my iPhone MAC address so I basically have to connect to the WiFi, do the with authentication enter room number and last name, then disconnect and boot up the router.
Is there a better way to get these connected to a WiFi for relaying where the Ethernet isn't an option?
I have a gl.Inet and it's very rare that I have to do anything special to get on a captive portal. I just connect to the travel router AP, then connect the travel router to the hotel's WiFi, and browse neverssl.com to get the captive portal.
A $40 router with WiFi to WiFi bridge support like the TP-Link AC750. You connect the router to the captive network and you connect your phone to the router. Connect everything else to the router.
I really like “bring your home everywhere aspect”. I can be a pain connecting my whole family devices to another SSID. If it can do WiFi repeating (as in login to a single hotel account and stream to rest of device), I would absolutely get one. If not, GL inet is still the way to go
Can confirm. It also has a mode to jump through the captive portal. I just set it up with the same SSID and PSK as my home wifi and everything we bring connects automatically. It also routes everything through Tailscale.
If you have an Android phone you can connect a USB-C to Ethernet dongle (the same one as you have for your laptop) and get tethering via Ethernet out of it. It works really well.
I wish one of these devices would have an internal battery again like the old HooToo Tripmates. Using it with a power bank doesn't feel quite the same.
Have Ubiquiti/Unifi firmware/devices ever been subject to independent, third-party security testing? Surely a company charging such a premium for high-end devices has invested in such processes and is proud to showcase them ...
As much I love Unifi products I dislike their privacy policy:
> Usage Data. We may collect certain information about your devices, your network, your system and third party devices connected to your network or system when you use the Services ("Usage Data"), including but not limited to device data, performance data, sensor data, motion data, temperature data, power usage data, device signals, device parameters, device identifiers that may uniquely identify the devices, including mobile devices, web request, Internet Protocol address, location information (including latitude and longitude), browser type, browser language, referring/exit pages and URLs, platform type, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies, web beacons and JavaScript that may uniquely identify your devices or browser.
Much less expensive (barring diy and print-a-case-yourself), and most importantly to certain people, easily available in the US from Amazon. (Jetkvm also suffers from unclear import costs and delays)
I clone my home WiFi SSID with my travel router so when we arrive at the hotel all of our devices auto connect without having to configure the consent / captive WiFi screen.
It’s also nice to control VPN and DNS from one place , in case the hotel is doing DNS or IP filtering.
And quite a few hotels still offer wired Ethernet , which helps performance.
Hotel wifi is often hilariously slow compared to plugging my travel router into an in-room ethernet socket. From spotty <10mbps to often a full uncontended gigabit.
Makes video conferencing and large downloads usable.
Please also consider the GL-iNEt Puli (XE300):
- 5V 2A USB C connector and a 5000mAh battery
- SIM and [not tested by myself] eSIM support.
- Tailscale and Nebula available as a plug-in.
- Main network and guest network can be set.
- OpenWRT if you want the GL-iNET firmware.
I am running a Netgear Nighthawk when I am on the road. But the Mubi7 looks interesting - I would not want to go back from 5G to a slower networks, sorry :)
"To connect the UniFi Travel Router to a guest network, open the UniFi Mobile App and select a nearby wireless network. If the network has a captive portal, it will automatically forward to your mobile device for login."
It likely relies on the travel router cloning the MAC address of your phone or whatever you use to authenticate. That way the hotel just thinks the travel router is your phone.
Took my PS5 Pro on a work trip. Was livid to find out the horrific 'browser' on the PS5 wasn't able to handle the captive portal login page. $700 gaming rig and it can't load a simple HTML page so I can enter my name and room number?! Ridiculous.
Thought about it for a few minutes and realized that the portal was likely just doing mac filtering. So I adjusted my MacBook Pro's MAC address to be the same as the PS5, went through the portal login and then powered down the MBP. Booted up the PS5 and I was online.
Don't need to do anything specific, doing this with my openwrt router in uni dorm. Router to upstream, phone to router, captive portal shows up on phone just have to login and all devices on router are logged in (and most importantly only count as 1 device)
Details are scarce right now, but they say that via the UniFi mobile you'll authenticate yourself onto the captive portal and the travel router will use that. Guessing it'll clone your phone's MAC?
This is brilliant, especially if you are already invested in the Ubiquiti/UniFi Ecosystem. There was a UniFi Teleport, and I think that function is now part of this Travel Router. From the video and the images, I believe this can also be added to a car act as a family wi-fi on the move.
I’ve always had a Pocket Travel Router (along with a thin but long enough RJ45 cable) with me while traveling, starting with the D-Link AC750 Travel Router. It does away with Wi-Fi Change, and all of your devices just continue to work, no worry about syncing, file-transfers, etc. A travel router becomes even more convenient when traveling with the family.
This won’t replace my GL-AXT1800 which offers a lot more flexibility.
Unifi shipping without eSIM support is a big mistake imo.
I don’t want to have a 5g router(which are insanely expensive) or a second smartphone with 5G.
It makes more sense if you are used to Ubiquiti ecosystem. Basically they assume you have Ubiquiti-based home/office network (they call it site). Then this device binds to this site and VPNs to it over Teleport (kinda similar thing to Tailscale, also built on top of wireguard). I would assume you can also configure Wireguard/Open VPN/IPsec manually as this is pretty standard in their ecosystem.
I guess it's nice if you are in Ubiquiti ecosystem already and want as little friction as possible. Otherwise it's probably similar to any travel router.
You don't need this. Strictly speaking, we don't need much.
But a travel router can be nice to have.
I bring some tech with me when I travel.
Obviously a phone, but also a decent-sounding smart speaker with long battery life so I can hear some music of my choosing in decent fidelity without using Bluetooth [bonus: battery-backed alarm clock!], a laptop for computing, a streaming box for plugging into the TV, maybe some manner of SBC to futz with if I'm bored and can't sleep during downtime.
All of this stuff really wants to have a [wifi] connection to a local area network, like it has when I'm at home.
A travel router (this one, or something from any other vendor mentioned in these threads, or just about anything that can run openwrt well) solves that problem.
All I have to do is get the router connected to the Internet however I do that (maybe there's ethernet, decent wifi, or maybe my phone hotspot or USB tethering is the order of the day), and then everything else Just Works as soon as it is unpacked and switched on.
And it all works togetherly, on my own wireless LAN -- just as those things also work at home.
Bonus nachos: With some manner of VPN like Tailscale configured in the router, or the automagic stuff this UBNT device is claimed to be able to do, a person can bring their home LAN with them, too -- without individual devices being configured to do that.
I think travel routers are pretty great, myself.
(But using Ubiquiti gear makes me feel filthy for reasons that I can't properly articulate, so I stick with things like Latvian-built Mikrotik hardware or something running OpenWRT for my own travel router uses.)
In my opinion, you only need this if you don't like connecting to unknown (insecure or suspect) network to get access to the internet. Ideally, you would configure this kind of router to connect to a VPN so that as soon as it connects to the internet, it immediately logins to the VPN and reroutes all your network traffic through it. This makes it more difficult for someone to hijack your connection or crack it. From the comments it also appears that some people use it to connect to their home network, either to access their home server or to use as VPN (this can help you get around geo-fence and unnecessary additional authentications that some services require for fraud prevention). Some travel routers can also combine 2 or more internet connections (public WiFi + mobile data) to provide you a more stable internet connection, which is often desirable.
You have a workplace that insists you are working from your home while you travel.
It has limits, like the amazon hardware keypress thingy with north korea showed recently, but unless your working at superbigtech or defense contractor it would probably work.
connect screenless devices, e.g., Echo Dot
extend weak wireless range in hotel
screen share or network between multiple devices eg travel with two laptops and can virtual KVM
only have to do the captive device on one - many hotels limit number of devices
extra security buffer
phone can't bridge wifi for headless like this
etc etc
All the videos I've seen show it adopted by an existing UniFi site, I wonder if I can still set it up as a standalone device? Hopefully even set up the VPN functionality to some WireGuard server (which was implied somewhere where it listed OpenVPN & WireGuard, can't find it now).
Im their target audience for sure but I’m not sure I need all of the same features my home network has. Really my travel router is just used to share a paid connection and run AdGuard network wide.
I built my Unifi system around my Tailscale network, so I get basically the same benefits for free. I guess you either put in the admin effort up front, or pay the appliance tax on the back. What am I missing?
I’ve been using a travel router with a battery last few years, so if I get internet on a plane, all of our devices get online access vs just one single phone.
I need something like this to share a single wifi connection among devices on a cruise. I don't care about the home network access though. Any recommendations?
You can search for "travel router" on youtube, buy a router like in the videos and done. However, a lot of cruise ships forbid travel routers, so you might need to buy a router which you can take the antenna out (keep the router in one luggage, the antenna in another luggage :-) ). I never did that though.
There are variants of this kind that double as and look like a battery charger (which you should claim) but can also repeat and NAT a wireless signal (which you should helpfully omit). Rumor says mudiv2 but I've never used that so can't confirm.
been using a gl.inet axt1800 for travel and it's been amazing. mainly for hotel wifi where you can login once and all your devices connect automatically. curious how this compares - the unifi ecosystem integration could be nice but gl.inet is way more hackable
UniFi website and marketing is just really really bad. They have amazing products but for some reason they don't really care about consumers and don't really know how to market to consumers. Just look at their website, it's impossible to find anything other than some super super specific networking stuff that you probably need a CCNP to even begin to understand
as a frequent traveler, most of my setup time were spent on captive portal. so unless Unifi changes that dramatically, otherwise the time cost is more of less the same.
I never travel without my GL-AXT1800. Saved me so many times: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/ I’m actually on it right now.
Same! And the best thing is that you can install Tailscale, so you can connect to your tailnet, and exit all traffic through one of your nodes (e.g., your home/office network).
It's incredibly useful, with the added bonus that you don't need to install tailscale client in any of your travel devices (phone, tablet, work computer, etc).
I’m seeing a lot of this same comment here, so I went to check out this tailscale thing, which clearly I must need.
Can anybody explain what Tailscale is, does, or why everybody seems to have it?
Looking at their website, it’s just a huge wall of business jargon. Really! Read it. It’s nothing but a list of enterprise terminology. There’s a “how it works “ page full of more (different) jargon, acronyms and buzzwords, but no simple explanation of why everybody on this thread seems to be paying money for this thing?
Any help? Should I just pay them my $6/month and hope I figure it out at some point?
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We’re from the US but were recently in Germany. Sometimes we were completely exhausted after a long day and just wanted to rest in our room a little before going to sleep. Our motel had like 2 English speaking channels and both sucked. We watched a lot of German TV because it was interesting, even if we could barely understand what was going on. After some time doing that, it was a pleasure watching some Hulu, courtesy of connecting to WireGuard back at our house in California so that we had an American IP.
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> with the added bonus that you don't need to install tailscale client in any of your travel devices (phone, tablet, work computer, etc).
I am sorry, this confuses me. If I don't have a lclient, for example in my laptop, how does my laptop uses Tailscale then?
Also, TailScale Personal says 3 users. Is that a problem for as we are 4? (me, wife, son, doughter).
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These are neat in that you can jump on and extend existing wifi infra, but it'd be nice if they also included 5G. I want a product that does both.
It's cool to have your own network in a hotel. But it'd be nice to be able to do that on the road, away from public wifi, internationally, whenever - which hotspots do. But at the same time, it'd be nice to be able to do the WiFi thing too to cut back on data usage. I frequently blow through my hotspot data.
I'd rather this be in one device instead of two. Beggars can't be choosers, though, I suppose?
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I do want to point out that dumping all of your traffic through a home/office network is not always a good idea. YMMV, but if you are in, say, LA, and pushed your 0.0.0.0 traffic through your home in NY, you just added quite a bit of latency.
This is great for keeping things in a LAN, but make sure you use your network rules correctly and don’t dump everything to your home network unless you need to.
(I too have a gli slate, but I use UI at home so will consider this when it comes out)
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Is this any better than just doing Hotspot with wifi bridge? I just have my hotspot on my pixel for my devices to connect to. Pixel itself is connected to whatever "public wifi" is there.
Your hotspot just makes the untrusted hotel wifi available via your phone wifi. The networks between your computer and your target services can still inspect and alter your data. Tailscale, or more specifically the Wireshark underneat, sets up an encrypted tunnel so those "untrusted" intermediate networks can't do that.
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Does that actually work? I don't think you can both have hotspot on and be connected to another network.
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In my experience hotels throttle wifi connection per device (IP/Mac address or whatever) and so you'd be better off using something that can use the wired connection in your room (which is usually unthrottled or has higher bandwidth) and be an AP for your personal devices.
If you don't have a wired connection then this wouldn't be any better, except for any connectivity features it might offer (probably some vpn capability).
I have a gl-inet device and it does pretty much all I need whenever I travel.
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Huge plus one. Useful to bridge hotel wifi so all my devices connect automatically, also useful as an ad-hoc router that fits into my travel pack.
Heartily seconded! A friend recommended I get one and now I push all my other technical friends to buy one, too.
My wife and I traveled a bit this year and it was great having all our gadgets connecting to a single AP under our control. It’s easily paid for itself by avoiding ludicrous per-device daily charges.
I think most travel APs can generally do this, but the feature that makes GL.iNet products popular is: extensibility. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers, but making products useful via extensibility is a sure fire way to open your target market directly up to prosumers. And those are the buyers that will find you.
I own two of their products, one of them I bought in 2019 and can still run what I need to on it.
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Where do you travel that you need wifi?
I’ve been getting SIM cards for over a decade, now even eSIMs are cheap enough for casual use.
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I'm not using it for travel, but I got a GL-BE3600 recently and it's surprisingly decent as a home router for my very specific needs.
I wired the desktop PCs in the house, so the only Wi-Fi users are mobiles, a smart TV, and a laptop. Everything else is already hanging off 2.5G wired switches. Pretty light duty, and I just wanted something that would provide robust routing and placeholder Wi-Fi. This does exactly that, and since it's OpenWRT based, it's probably marginally less terrible than whatever TP-Link was offering in the same price range.
It does run annoyingly hot, but I should just buy a little USB desk fan and point it at the router :P
I've had very impressive success running upstream OpenWRT on TP-Link hardware: I have Archer C7 access points running with literally years of uptime.
That being said, for any new application, I suggest using at least an 802.11ax AP, because cheap 2.4GHz devices that support 802.11ax are becoming common and using an 802.11ac router means that your 2.4GHz devices will be stuck with 802.11n, which is quite a bit less efficient. Even if you don't need any appreciable speed, it's preferable to use a more efficient protocol that uses less airtime.
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I have the same router as the OP article - it ran at 72C until I did [this](https://phasefactor.dev/2024/01/15/glinet-fan.html#choosing-...). Currently running at 60C!
Have you tried hooking it up to an Ethernet port in a hotel room like the one that the TV uses?
This rarely works. The TV network is usually access controlled, so you either won't get an IP or you simply won't have internet access.
Some hotel rooms (particularly older business hotels) will have an ethernet port for the guest. These work maybe 50% of the time these days. Sometimes you can find a Ruckus AP in your room at outlet level, and these usually have several ethernet ports on the bottom. These also have a working port around 30% of the time.
So, TL;DR: various ethernet ports in hotel rooms work less than half the time these days.
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I've had success hooking it up to some Ethernet cables in hotels, but it's 50/50.
I could never figure out which gl-inet to get, since some of the newer products seemed less powerful than older ones depending on the product family or something...
> some of the newer products seemed less powerful than older ones
Cynic in me thinks it's because they don't want you to buy one product and be set for a decade, like HN-er here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46373387. Older products might've been too good.
Not sure if you're talking in the context of travel routers, but if you're not, the Flint 2 is always a solid pick.
I think the GL-X3000 could be the daddy for power users and any eventuality: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x3000/
I really like my GLi microrouter.
https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/
I bought it for my vacations, so I wouldn't have to configure my kid's gadgets, but it is really useful as a wifi adaptor too.
And you can run it from a powerbank.
Do you mind expounding on how it has saved you? I'd love to know the practical use cases.
While on a scuba diving trip in Thailand a couple months ago we could position the router slightly outside our hotel room to be able to be able to strongly connect to the very dodgy hotel wifi so my girlfriend could do her work calls.
It would also automatically log into the captive wifi which seemed to require a login every hour or so.
Another time we Ethernet into it using the cable in another hotel to bypass some ridiculous speed limitations on their access point.
I'm considering getting their model which can take SIM cards, so that we can also failover to mobile networks wherever we are.
I was thinking of using that in combination with Beelink ME Mini N150 with proxmox installed on it and host different net tools, git, etc that’s available on the go. I might be overthinking the setup
What is the benefit of this over, for example, an iPhone hotspot?
Run one wireguard server in your home and one client instance on this router and now all of your devices can share the same residential VPN connection. No fraud blocks or extra verifications from your banking apps, no million suspicious login detected from all your social accounts, use your home netflix account, etc. All without your individual devices running a VPN app.
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An iPhone can't bridge a wifi network. So you need something like a travel router to share a wifi connection.
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chromecast - godsend on long hotel stays. need to dial in through my home (wireguard) so no license issues with streamers and once I connect my GL.iNet GL-MT300N-V2 to hotel wifi instant bubble of safe wifi for all my devices! weighs nothing, been using for 8 years rock solid.
If you’re using a VPN: iPhone won’t route hotspot clients over the VPN, so you need to set up VPN on all clients.
You can control it from the ground up, including installing alternate firmware. You can also use VPNs etc.
Husband can go pick up food order and baby cam still accessible from wife’s phone.
How do you handle captive portals in hotels ?
Usually you connect your laptop/phone to the portable router network, which then just pulls up the captive portal. Once you auth from one device, any device behind the router is authed with the portal. This is because the hotel network just sees your router's IP/MAC.
Connect on your phone or other device. Connect to travel router. Clone the mac address of your device. Connect router to wifi. Adjust device to not auto login. Good to go.
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Yes these are the way. Use them to get cheap anker security cams to work as baby monitors while we’re in hotel rooms
Is there a 5g dongle I can connect to it? I’ve been searching to no avail
What advantage does this have over the cheaper UniFi router in the OP?
The Beryl AX is going for cheaper ($70) on Amazon right now vs the UniFi Travel Router ($80). Better bang for the buck on both hardware and software without needing specific Ubiquiti anything.
The UniFi router depends on you already having a UniFi environment. If you do, it's a good option, but the GL would work with any heterogeneous network
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It's available right now, for one.
I carry my GL.iNet GL-E750V2 all over the world.
these are awesome, i just take my old wifi router tp-link, its big though. I might have to get one of these little guys.
should I be concerned this is Chinese-made? And will the UniFi have similar feature set?
What’s the use case exactly?
I have this.
TP-Link AC750
https://a.co/d/esxrRA4
When you are some place with a captive network and want to use devices that don’t have a browser. You connect the router to the WiFi network that has internet access and you connect the other WiFi network to a device with a browser like your phone. Every device looks like one device to the captive network and you can use them all.
Second use case, I now live in a place with a shared internet access that is shared between all of the units. Anyone can broadcast to and control our Roku device and there is no way to block it from the Roku.
We create a private network with the router
One is actually usable wifi at hotels with ethernet cables available. I don't use that device, but a DIY version that also acts as a portable media server while traveling. We can tunnel back to our home network, but often stay places with very bad reception and or internet access. Also helps keep the kids entertained on longer road trips. They can connect their devices to the router as we travel and have full access to the cached media.
I am apparently dumb. What benefit does this give you, other than a segregated network? Do us hotels typically have exposed Ethernet ports?
I always travel with my GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX) and this is what I use it for:
- My wife and I travel with multiple devices (laptops, phones, Chromecast...) and when we get to a hotel/Airbnb, I simply connect my Beryl AX to their network (it deals with captive portals btw) and all of our devices automatically connect.
- I changed the `/etc/hosts` directly in the router, meaning I can test my local servers under custom domains easily on my other devices like phones/tablets without apps like SquidMan.
- I route specific domains through specific VPNs. Government websites, streaming websites, AWS services, etc.
- I can plug in a 4G USB modem into it and it can automatically fallback to it if the main connection drops.
- It has built-in Tailscale support.
When I travel, I like carrying as little as possible. These comments are fascinating to me, people are brining more devices than I have in my whole house and needing to make a LAN for them.
Personally I just connect my phone to WiFi and then use Tailscale and call it a day.
It's really dependent upon the expected downtime at the hotel for me. I do about 150 nights in hotels a year.
Some of those trips I'll have extended time of 18+ hours of not really doing anything outside of the hotel other than grabbing dinner. For those types of trips I'm definitely more apt to bring additional devices like my GLinet travel router and MAYBE a streaming stick. I've also brought RPis or MCUs for tinkering during my downtime.
However, other trips I'm with you. I bring my phone, laptop, iPad (required for job), and chargers and that's about it for devices. I really try to limit my packing to things I know I will use and honestly for probably 50% of my travel that's clean clothes, toothbrush, phone, and wallet.
My travel I describe above is solo, work related. When the family comes we tend to tow a 9,000 lbs condo on wheels, so literally the "kitchen sink".
Over time, I've taken less and less stuff. I still take my iPad in a keyboard case for longer trips, and as a backup for 2FA incase something happens to my phone, but now I mostly feel like my phone alone is "good enough." Doomscrolling on the phone works just as well on the road as at home :).
I do load my phone up with eBooks for unexpected downtime, and I do have an emulator on it. I would not chose to use my phone for reading or gaming normally, but on the road it's "good enough" - jack of all trades, master of none.
Of course if I'm traveling for work my work laptop comes, but I never put personal accounts on it.
The only trips I've been on with 18+ hours of down time were due to weather events (getting snowed in on a ski trip). That was with a big group. We just played card games, cooked, talked, and consumed copious amounts of alcohol to pass the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Jesus, that's a lot of away time. What do you do?
Plenty of us travel with family!
I also think the variable state of hotel TVs is a factor even when travelling alone. Being able to plug your own device into the HDMI is valuable.
Fair enough, I get the TV for kids thing.
For me, I can't remember the last time I used a hotel TV. When I travel, I want to do stuff at the place I'm visiting, the hotel room is just a place to sleep and shower.
If I do want to watch something, I much prefer the experience of my much nicer TV and surround sound system at home. That said, I don't watch much TV, so maybe this is easier for me.
If I have downtime when I travel, I tend to just read, or do the same thing I do at home - doomscrolling news, reddit, HN :)
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My "family" is multiple devices. M networks (hotel, airport, lounge) and N devices means O(M * N) wifi setups, so carrying a known 200g router means I only have to do O(M+N) setups.
But yeah I also have P family so O(M * P * N) would be a headache.
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I have a dedicated travel AppleTV for this. AppleTV is great at hotel captive portals (forwarding the web page to your phone). I am already logged into all my streaming apps, including my home DVR (ChannelsDVR).
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Depends a lot on the travel, yes? If I’m going to be out on the town a lot for a couple of days, I’m traveling light. If I’m going to be somewhere for a week and know I’m going to need a lot of decompression time playing Animal Crossing back at the motel, I’ll pack for that instead.
I'm not sure there's a dichotomy. I travel for a week at a time across the country, and bring only a backpack that fits under the seat on the airplane. But there's a GL.iNet router in that bag, since it gives all my devices Mullvad + Tailscale. Good use of space in my opinion, since I can access all the services I host from my home 3000 miles away with zero extra config.
Some people spend 100+ days a year in hotels.
As a someone who has traveled for work more days in the year than not, I'd much rather not require yet another device to carry and deploy in an ever changing network environment.
The multi-uplink is intriguing. While on the surface it seems that an ostensibly 'plug and play' carrier aggregation dongle (no idea if this is actually a feature) would be a easy solution to smooth out poor connections, many networking hiccups encountered during travel just boil down to impossibly terrible RF environments, regardless of the spectrum or protocol.
I did 82 days last year. Everyone travels different, but for me I feel like any time I spend watching TV in the hotel is wasted time - I'm in a whole other city, surely there's something I can do? The hotel is just somewhere to take a shower and sleep. I don't watch much TV in general though so I guess it's easier for me.
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I spent about 30 days this year in hotels and don't envy these people at all.
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I spend about 200 days in hotels and I don’t want the extra weight or deal with dns/paywall issues
If this thing can circumvent the China firewall reliably and broadcast non-firewalled Wi-Fi in my hotel room for all my devices so that I don't have to set up VPN on each one, they absolutely have my business.
However I don't think Unifi's default protocols are useful for that. To get reliable performance over China's firewall, you need plausibly-deniable obfuscated protocols, e.g. encoding all your packets inside a stream of requests of JPEGs of cat pictures over HTTP port 80 or some such.
I used to have a UniFi gateway for the nice traffic visualization but Ubiquiti lost my trust when they started running telemetry without consent and I’ve gone back to an OpenBSD’s box as router, thus this device does little for me.
I’m looking forward to the GL.Inet MUDI 7, their first 5G hotspot, which should be running an open-source and hackable OS unlike most hotspots:
https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-e5800/
I have a little WIFI-6 era GL.iNet travel router and it is fantastic, really like their software and hardware.
https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/
For both home and travel routers OpenWRT is far and away superior to Unifi gear. Usability, configurability, and especially security.
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Ubiquidropped all cloud requirements, but I am not sure what you are referring too here.
I haven't paid attention for a while, but this definitely hurt their brand massively: https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/07/ubiquiti_networks_pho...
Pretty sure that's what OP is referring to.
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I’ve been waiting for one of these with built in eSIM support
This one has eSIM and dual physical SIM support.
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To all the commenters who asked if it's worth it? IMO it's super worth it if you have more than one wifi access point and it gets more and more worth it as your network gets more complicated.
I upgraded to homogenous ubiquiti/unifi when I set up a point to multi-point on my farm because I thought it would make that part easier. Surprisingly, those links aren't really baked in to the rest of it, but the router and wifi antennas that I've installed around those links "just work" with a private, protected, and guest network.
I used to have to update two different routers with the same SSID, username and password to make "hopping" from one to the next "seamless" and, now that I've got 8 wifi antennas in a mesh with a single UI to configure them all, I can't even imagine how I'd do it with the hodge-podge of gear I used to work with.
And I'm probably going to buy a travel router, but I'm wondering, if I use it connect to the hotel wifi, will I be able to use the thing as a wifi hotspot as well or do I have to use an ethernet point because the wifi is "taken"?
You can connect a UTR to the hotel network, and also connect your devices via WiFi to it; works just like GL.iNet's Slate 7 in this regard.
So… hear me out. Could I connect this to an airline’s paid in-flight WiFi network, and then broadcast an open network to effectively open up access to all other passengers for free? If enough WiFi pirates do this on flights perhaps it would kill paid WiFi entirely (just need enough Good Samaritans)
(And yes I know there are other bypasses you can do like spoofing MAC addresses to get around some device count restrictions)
Really what you should be doing is setting the SSID to "$2 in flight WiFi!" and selling access.
You'll make tens of ... dollars every flight.
And get arrested to boot!
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/man-arrested-for-sett...
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Airlines throttle per device, unfortunately.
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That’s not going to be an issue at all domestically soon unless you fly one of the cheapest airlines.
Delta has had free WiFi for awhile now as does JetBlue and I believe Southwest. It’s coming soon to AA and United.
I fly Delta 99% of the time.
“Soon”? Why would they give up that money though? I feel like there’s so little competition they aren’t feeling the pressure. Otherwise everyone else would have been hurting 15+ years ago when JetBlue started their free Wi-Fi.
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Just got back from several flights with Hawaiian, free Starlink on every one.
Maybe. And then get throttled or banned for using too much bandwidth. You don't need this product to do this though, you can do the same thing with a laptop and your phone
They throttle.
Android phones can share their wifi connection like this.
(some android phones: my Pixel can, Samsung can't, although it seems that other Samsungs do have it.)
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Insane to me that Apple still does not support this.
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I carry a burner Android just for this feature. Great for sharing with my iPhone and iPad on a flight.
Playing with fire. It could be potentially construed as an attempt to steal personal info.
I’ve done this. Works fine. Issue in general is the airlines throttle the heck out of devices.
I basically do this so my gf and I can connect all of our phones and computers.
Probably. I do this with a GLinet and it works great.
Flight internet usually comes with a data quota.
Yes
Why would this kill paid wifi? A bunch of airlines are already switching to free wifi anyways, but the ones that aren't seem unlikely to just kick back as an army of easily-identifiable tech bros attempt to defraud them. It's a bit like trying to steal money from the bank after you've handed them your ID and debit card.
This is brilliant, actually very innovative product by Unifi. It's interesting because it seems they do what Apple does: they can add new products and features only because all the devices work together in an ecosystem.
They were founded by ex Apple employees, so there's that.
Innovative how? Many travel routers already exist and support similar features
The way it automatically connects to your home and presents to your devices as part of your home WiFi. So you bring that device with you and everything else works like you're back home.
I use OPNSense and OpenWRT myself and there's no way you can make travel routers this convenient with them.
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It seems like the main feature is being able to access your home network to watch netflix, access LAN devices, etc.
How is this different compared to running a tailscale exit node in your home network?
Is the benefit of this that you have a hardware device that you can connect to instead of needing software like tailscale?
I have a hard time believing anyone would actually use this versus self-hosting headscale in a discarded ThinkCentre and running it from a closet.
Not sure if you’re serious but reeks of “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially”
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I run OpnSense, Wireguard, hooked up to third party WiFi access points, and I had to do a lot of configuration and work that I wouldn't have had to do if I had just bought Ubiquiti equipment.
I did save money, a really significant amount of money.
Obviously, yes, I am capable of going through the work that eliminates my need for this product. I have no trouble configuring Wireguard and setting it up on my client devices and running through all that.
But it was a lot of work to get to this point and I had to spend a lot of time learning how to do that, even as a person who is already technical. Wireguard in particular took me a solid half a day to build understanding and get it configured.
If I was a little bit richer and I went back in time I'd probably just buy all Unifi. Actually if I went back in time I think with my same levels of wealth I'd probably just buy Unifi and save some precious time.
This specific device does seem like a really nice extension of their product line.
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I’m in the market for a solid travel router, and my home network is all Unifi gear. This is a no brainer, especially with the built-in Teleport support.
I think so: it looks like "UniFi Teleport" is also based on Wireguard.
You can also do this with a travel router like one of GL.iNet's and Tailscale subnet routers.
UniFi teleport is also very buggy with frequent disconnects. Tailscale and WireGuard proper don’t have those issues for me.
How would Tailscale run in your home network without a hardware device to connect to?
You can create a subnet router on tailscale and access any device on your local network, regardless of them having tailscale installed
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Not to take away from this device, I think it’s pretty neat. But you can run tailscale on anything, even Apple TVs. If you have a Unifi network odds are that you have at least one spare computing device that can run tailscale.
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Available December 29th: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/utr
Wifi 5 for an $80 router in 2026 (I mean we're almost there) is pretty disappointing. I get that its mostly going to be used on crappy hotel networks and the crappy hotel network will often be the bottleneck but $80 looks to be roughly twice the price of the typical travel wifi 5 travel router, about equal to the price of a typical wifi 6 travel router, and only $30-40 cheaper than a typical wifi 7 travel router.
I don't mind a unifi premium for the integration but they should at least have a $50 wifi 5 version and a $100 wifi 6 "pro" version
I'd pay $30 for the software alone that actually works.
I don't think they necessarily compete for the same market as some of these other routers. This seems way more compact than many of the other options on the market. I just briefly looked around on Amazon and even many other wifi 5 routers look to be about 2x or thicker than this one. Compared to the GL.inet Opal for example, it's about 20mm smaller in each dimension: 118 x 85 x 30mm (Opal) vs. 95.95 x 65 x 12.5 mm (Unifi). The Unifi is pretty close to a tiny 5000 mAh portable battery.
Now what I'd be really more interested in a Pro version, more so than wifi 6, would be a built-in modem with SIM/eSIM.
Is there really much difference between Wifi 5, 6, 7, especially when travelling given relatively limited speeds you might find yourself in?
I don't even know what is my Wifi "version" at none of the places I have my routers, things just work for all purposes (work, gaming, streaming).
I didn’t think there was much point in WiFi 6 unless you go 6e and get the 6Ghz frequency?
It’s wifi 5 but the most interesting part is it uses 5w of power max, I thought it’d be more.
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Based on unifis release schedule that means may 2026
Wonder how this will work to connect into hotel networks - on my glinet I have to clone my iPhone MAC address so I basically have to connect to the WiFi, do the with authentication enter room number and last name, then disconnect and boot up the router.
Is there a better way to get these connected to a WiFi for relaying where the Ethernet isn't an option?
This new Unifi device supports captive portal authentication flows, so you don't need to do that whole shuffle.
Source https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ruv550at3k8
I have a gl.Inet and it's very rare that I have to do anything special to get on a captive portal. I just connect to the travel router AP, then connect the travel router to the hotel's WiFi, and browse neverssl.com to get the captive portal.
A $40 router with WiFi to WiFi bridge support like the TP-Link AC750. You connect the router to the captive network and you connect your phone to the router. Connect everything else to the router.
I really like “bring your home everywhere aspect”. I can be a pain connecting my whole family devices to another SSID. If it can do WiFi repeating (as in login to a single hotel account and stream to rest of device), I would absolutely get one. If not, GL inet is still the way to go
Can GL inet not do that? Genuinely asking.
Can confirm. It also has a mode to jump through the captive portal. I just set it up with the same SSID and PSK as my home wifi and everything we bring connects automatically. It also routes everything through Tailscale.
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This Unifi device is primarily meant as an add-on to exising Unifi setups as it's all well integrated.
can do it
? You just need to set it up once and devices will auto reconnect by default
GL can absolutely do this already.
I never really understand why you'd rather have one of these over just enabling "hotspot" on your phone. Ethernet is the only reason I can think of
If you have an Android phone you can connect a USB-C to Ethernet dongle (the same one as you have for your laptop) and get tethering via Ethernet out of it. It works really well.
What if you want your kid(s) and/or partner(s) to stay connected after you leave the hotel room with your phone?
What if you want to use the hotel's internet connection instead of your roaming data?
What if you want to use wireguard or tailscale to funnel all traffic through your home network?
What if you want to enable your family's devices to connect to your self-hosted services?
1. Fair enough.
2. Most Android phones can do this.
3. Android phones can do this.
4. This is just the same question as 3.
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2,3 and 4 android can do. 1 is very fair but could be achieved with an old phone, maybe with a rubbish battery plugged in.
we take a webcam to keep eye on dogs sometimes. I use a travel router for that
This is a really fair example.
I wish one of these devices would have an internal battery again like the old HooToo Tripmates. Using it with a power bank doesn't feel quite the same.
GL-iNet’s Mudi product line has an internal battery and eSIM and physical SIM card support.
Mudi V2: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-e750/
They have an upcoming 5G NR WiFi 7 version:
Mudi 7: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-e5800/
Effectively nobody sells Wi-Fi 7 capable gear yet:
https://www.rtings.com/router/learn/research/wifi-7-mlo
Have Ubiquiti/Unifi firmware/devices ever been subject to independent, third-party security testing? Surely a company charging such a premium for high-end devices has invested in such processes and is proud to showcase them ...
As much I love Unifi products I dislike their privacy policy:
> Usage Data. We may collect certain information about your devices, your network, your system and third party devices connected to your network or system when you use the Services ("Usage Data"), including but not limited to device data, performance data, sensor data, motion data, temperature data, power usage data, device signals, device parameters, device identifiers that may uniquely identify the devices, including mobile devices, web request, Internet Protocol address, location information (including latitude and longitude), browser type, browser language, referring/exit pages and URLs, platform type, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies, web beacons and JavaScript that may uniquely identify your devices or browser.
https://www.ui.com/legal/privacypolicy/#c1
you can disable it in settings https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042384093-Analytics...
You should overlay something else rather than rely on WiFi securiry. Tailscale or a vpn, private cloud or just tls, depending on your threat model.
None of those would not prevent someone owning your device because the firmware has vulnerabilities.
Related, the GLiNet Comet (remote KVM) are also excellent. Have bought one for every elderly family member so I can support them more easily.
This would’ve been great 15y ago, but today they all want help on their phone and there’s no good way of doing that.
Oh, that's tempting. Is there vanilla openwrt or any other all-FOSS firmware for it? I'm rather paranoid about this kind of appliance.
How does it compare to the PiKVM?
Much less expensive (barring diy and print-a-case-yourself), and most importantly to certain people, easily available in the US from Amazon. (Jetkvm also suffers from unclear import costs and delays)
I clone my home WiFi SSID with my travel router so when we arrive at the hotel all of our devices auto connect without having to configure the consent / captive WiFi screen.
It’s also nice to control VPN and DNS from one place , in case the hotel is doing DNS or IP filtering.
And quite a few hotels still offer wired Ethernet , which helps performance.
Hotel wifi is often hilariously slow compared to plugging my travel router into an in-room ethernet socket. From spotty <10mbps to often a full uncontended gigabit.
Makes video conferencing and large downloads usable.
I hadn't considered this advantage. Hotel wifi is indeed often crappy.
Please also consider the GL-iNEt Puli (XE300): - 5V 2A USB C connector and a 5000mAh battery - SIM and [not tested by myself] eSIM support. - Tailscale and Nebula available as a plug-in. - Main network and guest network can be set. - OpenWRT if you want the GL-iNET firmware.
I am running a Netgear Nighthawk when I am on the road. But the Mubi7 looks interesting - I would not want to go back from 5G to a slower networks, sorry :)
>while captive portal logins on hotel networks are handled quietly in the background.
Anyone know how it automagically sorts out connecting to the hotel WiFi?
Hotels often want some combination of my room number and surname I've found, or some combination of hotel name and floor password.
"To connect the UniFi Travel Router to a guest network, open the UniFi Mobile App and select a nearby wireless network. If the network has a captive portal, it will automatically forward to your mobile device for login."
from the FAQ https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/utr
It likely relies on the travel router cloning the MAC address of your phone or whatever you use to authenticate. That way the hotel just thinks the travel router is your phone.
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Took my PS5 Pro on a work trip. Was livid to find out the horrific 'browser' on the PS5 wasn't able to handle the captive portal login page. $700 gaming rig and it can't load a simple HTML page so I can enter my name and room number?! Ridiculous.
Thought about it for a few minutes and realized that the portal was likely just doing mac filtering. So I adjusted my MacBook Pro's MAC address to be the same as the PS5, went through the portal login and then powered down the MBP. Booted up the PS5 and I was online.
Damn it feels good to be a gangster.
Sometimes it's also possible to simply disconnect the hotel's SIP phone from the Ethernet jack and use that :)
This is the way. Nice job!
It doesn't. You connect it to the hotel wifi and then complete the captive portal requirements on your phone, laptop, etc.
> Automatic handling of captive portal authentication
Very curious about how they're pulling this off
Don't need to do anything specific, doing this with my openwrt router in uni dorm. Router to upstream, phone to router, captive portal shows up on phone just have to login and all devices on router are logged in (and most importantly only count as 1 device)
Details are scarce right now, but they say that via the UniFi mobile you'll authenticate yourself onto the captive portal and the travel router will use that. Guessing it'll clone your phone's MAC?
This is brilliant, especially if you are already invested in the Ubiquiti/UniFi Ecosystem. There was a UniFi Teleport, and I think that function is now part of this Travel Router. From the video and the images, I believe this can also be added to a car act as a family wi-fi on the move.
I’ve always had a Pocket Travel Router (along with a thin but long enough RJ45 cable) with me while traveling, starting with the D-Link AC750 Travel Router. It does away with Wi-Fi Change, and all of your devices just continue to work, no worry about syncing, file-transfers, etc. A travel router becomes even more convenient when traveling with the family.
This won’t replace my GL-AXT1800 which offers a lot more flexibility.
Unifi shipping without eSIM support is a big mistake imo. I don’t want to have a 5g router(which are insanely expensive) or a second smartphone with 5G.
It doesn't have a modem. Why would it support eSIM?
It would be super convenient, given it's size, for me to purchase a eSim card abroad with unlimited data and not having to drain my phone battery.
This is a travel router.
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Tailscale? (I don't think it does)
WAN connectivity via USB tethering and ethernet, not just wifi?
The blog has almost no details, but the product page is also pretty light on technical details.
The competition (I use GL-MT3000) is pretty strong.
It makes more sense if you are used to Ubiquiti ecosystem. Basically they assume you have Ubiquiti-based home/office network (they call it site). Then this device binds to this site and VPNs to it over Teleport (kinda similar thing to Tailscale, also built on top of wireguard). I would assume you can also configure Wireguard/Open VPN/IPsec manually as this is pretty standard in their ecosystem.
I guess it's nice if you are in Ubiquiti ecosystem already and want as little friction as possible. Otherwise it's probably similar to any travel router.
I travel internationally all the time. Someone tell me why I need this.
You don't need this. Strictly speaking, we don't need much.
But a travel router can be nice to have.
I bring some tech with me when I travel.
Obviously a phone, but also a decent-sounding smart speaker with long battery life so I can hear some music of my choosing in decent fidelity without using Bluetooth [bonus: battery-backed alarm clock!], a laptop for computing, a streaming box for plugging into the TV, maybe some manner of SBC to futz with if I'm bored and can't sleep during downtime.
All of this stuff really wants to have a [wifi] connection to a local area network, like it has when I'm at home.
A travel router (this one, or something from any other vendor mentioned in these threads, or just about anything that can run openwrt well) solves that problem.
All I have to do is get the router connected to the Internet however I do that (maybe there's ethernet, decent wifi, or maybe my phone hotspot or USB tethering is the order of the day), and then everything else Just Works as soon as it is unpacked and switched on.
And it all works togetherly, on my own wireless LAN -- just as those things also work at home.
Bonus nachos: With some manner of VPN like Tailscale configured in the router, or the automagic stuff this UBNT device is claimed to be able to do, a person can bring their home LAN with them, too -- without individual devices being configured to do that.
I think travel routers are pretty great, myself.
(But using Ubiquiti gear makes me feel filthy for reasons that I can't properly articulate, so I stick with things like Latvian-built Mikrotik hardware or something running OpenWRT for my own travel router uses.)
In my opinion, you only need this if you don't like connecting to unknown (insecure or suspect) network to get access to the internet. Ideally, you would configure this kind of router to connect to a VPN so that as soon as it connects to the internet, it immediately logins to the VPN and reroutes all your network traffic through it. This makes it more difficult for someone to hijack your connection or crack it. From the comments it also appears that some people use it to connect to their home network, either to access their home server or to use as VPN (this can help you get around geo-fence and unnecessary additional authentications that some services require for fraud prevention). Some travel routers can also combine 2 or more internet connections (public WiFi + mobile data) to provide you a more stable internet connection, which is often desirable.
You have a workplace that insists you are working from your home while you travel.
It has limits, like the amazon hardware keypress thingy with north korea showed recently, but unless your working at superbigtech or defense contractor it would probably work.
connect screenless devices, e.g., Echo Dot extend weak wireless range in hotel screen share or network between multiple devices eg travel with two laptops and can virtual KVM only have to do the captive device on one - many hotels limit number of devices extra security buffer phone can't bridge wifi for headless like this etc etc
All the videos I've seen show it adopted by an existing UniFi site, I wonder if I can still set it up as a standalone device? Hopefully even set up the VPN functionality to some WireGuard server (which was implied somewhere where it listed OpenVPN & WireGuard, can't find it now).
You’re probably better off getting a GL device. They already have support.
Really wish their press Release / marketing want obviously llm generated.
Im their target audience for sure but I’m not sure I need all of the same features my home network has. Really my travel router is just used to share a paid connection and run AdGuard network wide.
I built my Unifi system around my Tailscale network, so I get basically the same benefits for free. I guess you either put in the admin effort up front, or pay the appliance tax on the back. What am I missing?
I’ve been using a travel router with a battery last few years, so if I get internet on a plane, all of our devices get online access vs just one single phone.
I don't understand this post. Is it an ad?
I have wireguard running on my home router. Why do I need a piece of hardware when my laptop already can connect to it from anywhere?
I've been to many hotels/apartments where you have to place the router on a very specific location because the Wifi/4G/5G coverage is super bad.
With Teltonica/GL.Inet you also can use small external antennas. Getting behind windows is often enough.
This is for those not aware of that setup lmao
I need something like this to share a single wifi connection among devices on a cruise. I don't care about the home network access though. Any recommendations?
You can search for "travel router" on youtube, buy a router like in the videos and done. However, a lot of cruise ships forbid travel routers, so you might need to buy a router which you can take the antenna out (keep the router in one luggage, the antenna in another luggage :-) ). I never did that though.
There are variants of this kind that double as and look like a battery charger (which you should claim) but can also repeat and NAT a wireless signal (which you should helpfully omit). Rumor says mudiv2 but I've never used that so can't confirm.
Does this also bridge L2 stuff so I am actually on my LAN?
Otherwise I don't really see the point to carry a specific hotspot device when my phone has one built in.
It reads "Tethered 5G", why would a high-end travel router not support sim/e-sims directly?!
Why would it? 5G modems are expensive. GL.iNet makes something like that, Puli AX — it usually goes for around $350 [1].
[1]: https://store.gl-inet.com/products/puli-ax-xe3000-wi-fi-6-5g...
79$ is not “high end”. 5G enabled router would cost twice as much - for a feature that not everybody will need.
been using a gl.inet axt1800 for travel and it's been amazing. mainly for hotel wifi where you can login once and all your devices connect automatically. curious how this compares - the unifi ecosystem integration could be nice but gl.inet is way more hackable
If this has a wifi antenna port would be very useful for marina wifi if you’re sailing around.
If I want to run NixOS on a cheap travel router, what are my best options?
Ideally mainline Linux support.
Brief research suggests one of the NanoPis.
The page doesn't even have a buy button. Why?
UniFi website and marketing is just really really bad. They have amazing products but for some reason they don't really care about consumers and don't really know how to market to consumers. Just look at their website, it's impossible to find anything other than some super super specific networking stuff that you probably need a CCNP to even begin to understand
Because it's not available until the 29th
Oh I thought one with 5g cellular connectivity
$79 is over priced, get a GL.iNet
Or just go Tailscale
$79 is so cheap that if it saves you 5 min in setup it pays for the difference to a GL.iNet/tailscale setup.
as a frequent traveler, most of my setup time were spent on captive portal. so unless Unifi changes that dramatically, otherwise the time cost is more of less the same.
it says travel but not supporting LTE/5G
Travel to a hotel.
Yea if this had 5g it would be worth it
Yeah you're not gonna get a cellular modem under $100 USD. Sorry
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whats the point of this? I got wireguard on my phone connected to my home network (also unifi).
If this device had a 5g sim slot, then I could see the point but it’s not that.
The main benefit of a travel router is creating a private network, and sharing a wifi connection. An iPhone can't do that, though Android phones can.
> though Android phones can
Interesting, as someone who has always used iPhones, wouldn't mind getting an Android phone for this.
Is there some app?
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Some third party WiFis limit the number of devices. This gets around that limit.
Sharing where? All my devices can connect directly thru to Wireguard vpn on my home network. Ipad, iphone, MBP, etc
A 5g phone tethering to your Wireguard connected MBP beats this out of the water
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