Comment by kstrauser
15 hours ago
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.
My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar150/) which is tucked behind her desk since at least 2019. Vanilla openwrt on it, provides WiFi from an Ethernet slot in the wall.
Uptime is in years, it’s invisible and chugs along without visible power draw. All her devices connect to it, including her Cisco voip phone. It autossh to my ovh server with remote port forward for remote admin. Cost me 15€ in 2016.
>> I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers
> My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (...) since at least 2019. All her devices connect to it (...) Cost me 15€ in 2016.
I think this answers GP's question as (yet another) solid reason why manufacturers "can't understand" prosumer needs - it's because targeting prosumers, or generally making products that "just works", is very bad for sales down the line.
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Isn't this considered to be "shadow IT"? and some enterprise networking devices have automated detection for such setups, I believe (?)
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Readers of HN will value flexibility and extensibility, but the other 99% of the folks there are fine with totally locked-down devices because it’s the only thing they know of. The lack of extensibility likely doesn’t affect sales/profit in any significant proportion.
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.
I can’t put a SIM in my ereader or Switch or iPad.
Changing countries a lot reduces this option a bit.
I’m sure I could find a good all Europe card, but I need my number for work calls.
In Europe you have free roaming so it (almost?) never makes sense to get a new sim per country.
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Convenient to connect all devices to one WiFi. E.g. baby camera is on same WiFi as laptop etc.