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I never travel without my GL-AXT1800. Saved me so many times: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/ I’m actu
by wateralien 10mo ago
I never travel without my GL-AXT1800. Saved me so many times: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/
I’m actually on it right now.
- matt-attack 10mo agoWhat’s the use case exactly?
- tstrimple 10mo agoOne 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.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoI have this. TP-Link AC750 https://a.co/d/esxrRA4 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
- kstrauser 10mo agoHeartily 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.
- windexh8er 10mo agoI 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.
- WhyNotHugo 10mo agoReaders 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.
- xgbi 10mo agoMy wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar150/ 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.
- TeMPOraL 10mo ago>> 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.
- qilo 10mo ago
- theoreticalmal 10mo agoWhat is the benefit of this over, for example, an iPhone hotspot?
- WillPostForFood 10mo agoAn iPhone can't bridge a wifi network. So you need something like a travel router to share a wifi connection.
- rtkwe 10mo agoThey're suggesting just running off your data plan which works for domestic travel (at least to urban areas with good cell service) and can work for international if you go through getting a data eSim.
- trelane 10mo agoYou can control it from the ground up, including installing alternate firmware. You can also use VPNs etc.
- neither_color 10mo agoRun 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.
- drnick1 10mo ago> 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. You don't need a "travel router" for this. My phone is permanently connected to my server via Wireguard (so that I can access my files from anywhere). Adding another device just requires adding a peer in the server's config file and can be accomplished very quickly. It's not clear what problem the travel router solves, unless perhaps you travel with dozens of devices. > no million suspicious login detected from all your social accounts, I can personally do without those.
- kleinsch 10mo agoHuge 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.
- hnburnsy 10mo agoHave you tried hooking it up to an Ethernet port in a hotel room like the one that the TV uses?
- avidiax 10mo agoThis 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.
- fastcall 10mo agoHow’s that access control handled? Very easy to spoof the MAC of the TV or setup some SNI spoofing proxy server, NGFWs with TLS Active Probing are probably harder to deal with but do hotels really have that?
- SomeUserName432 10mo ago> Very easy to spoof the MAC of the TV or setup some SNI spoofing proxy server At that point you're in the 0.1% that the hotel does not really need to worry about. The other >99% will still need to pay for wifi.
- danw1979 10mo agoit’s probably >0.1% here …
- hnburnsy 10mo agoI've read the GL.inet can easily clone the TV Mac, pretty cool.
- ei8ths 10mo agothese are awesome, i just take my old wifi router tp-link, its big though. I might have to get one of these little guys.
- cosmosgenius 10mo agoIs 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.
- gruez 10mo agoDoes that actually work? I don't think you can both have hotspot on and be connected to another network.
- panarky 10mo agoYes, it has actually worked starting with the Pixel 3. It's called Dual-Band Simultaneous or "STA+AP" (Station + Access Point) concurrency that can bridge an existing wifi connection to an access point to other devices via a hotspot.
- dorfsmay 10mo agoYes it works. Now you can also tether via USB. Both of them have worked flawlessly for me recently.
- Doohickey-d 10mo agoIt seems to be only on certain devices feature(?): on my Pixel it worked, Samsung phone just says "sorry, can't do that".
- esperent 10mo agoMost newer (or at least new + expensive) phones can share their wifi connection via hotspot. 2.4gh only though I think.
- mi_lk 10mo agoDo you know what’s the technical term to search if a phone has that capability? Asking for an iPhone
- 10mo ago
- guiambros 10mo agoSame! 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).
- echelon 10mo agoThese 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?
- sokoloff 10mo agoI’m using a GLinet GL-XE3000 for that and it’s great. Initial setup of the 5G eSIM on a physical SIM took a little searching but it’s been rock solid and having consistent access on the road and hotels has been great for family travel. It has a built-in battery, but I’ve never really tested the duration (I suspect it’s 3-6 hours) as I put it on its AC adapter in the hotel and the n a cigarette lighter adapter in the car, so the battery gets used 15-45 minutes at a time to bridge between those two places. I like it enough that I might buy a second, more compact unit for when space is more a premium, but I’ve been really happy with this one.
- SergeAx 10mo agoWhat is your usage scenario for this device? It's $400 and 3/4 kg.
- sokoloff 10mo agoI bought that specific model to provide connectivity for our robotics team’s pit computers. For this need, good antenna performance is key, since different venues differ wildly in WiFi and cell coverage and when we setup the evening before comps, I want the best chance of getting a solid connection and offering it to the pit LAN. But now that I have it, the device is handy for family travel as well. Put an unlimited data eSIM in the device and everyone has “unlimited” data n the road and when we arrive at a hotel or AirBnB, one person signs it on to wifi and everyone is connected, including tailscale connections to home. If I was doing personal and work travel only, I’d look for a smaller unit, but still with a decent battery.
- password4321 10mo agoI 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...
- torginus 10mo agoNot sure if you're talking in the context of travel routers, but if you're not, the Flint 2 is always a solid pick.
- TeMPOraL 10mo ago> 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46373387. Older products might've been too good.
- wateralien 10mo agoI think the GL-X3000 could be the daddy for power users and any eventuality: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x3000/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x3000/
- upcoming-sesame 10mo agoHow do you handle captive portals in hotels ?
- mmerickel 10mo agoConnect 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.
- dalanmiller 10mo agoIs this an annoying amount of steps? And do you have to do this on every expiry of your session on the portal?
- figmert 10mo agoGL.iNet routers don't even need this. It has an option to pass through captive portals. So you connect to your GL.iNet AP, then you set it up for the hotel WiFi, tick the option for passing through (it essentially disables VPN, AdGuard Home and other things if enabled), it will then link you to the captive portal where you can log in as you would otherwise. Once the internet is active, the GL.iNet router will then re-enable things like VPN and AdGuard Home. Since these devices are OpenWrt underneath with a pretier ui, I presume this is all possible on any OpenWrt device.
- jtokoph 10mo agoUsually 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.
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo agoWhat advantage does this have over the cheaper UniFi router in the OP?
- fragmede 10mo agoIt's available right now, for one.
- SturgeonsLaw 10mo agoThe 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
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo agoThanks! Thats helpful.
- threatofrain 10mo agoThe 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.
- hakfoo 10mo agoI'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
- amluto 10mo agoI'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.
- rpcope1 10mo agoHonestly if you're not invested in maybe Ruckus or Aruba, I don't think there's much better than OpenWRT on a decently supported AP. I had a bunch of the C7s with OpenWRT and they've been totally bulletproof. I only upgraded to R650s recently and it's not clear beyond maybe the antenna setup and the fact that it's ax now that it's much better.
- hakfoo 10mo agoI think I actually retired an Archer C7 for this. The goal was something 2.5G ready because the city has systematically rolled out fibre to every neghbourhood around here and I'm just waiting for the knock.
- skirmish 10mo agoDitto, the TP-Link's Archer A7 firmware is a security nightmare [1] but with DD-WRT installed it is very stable and reliable. [1] Daughter invited ~10 classmates to prepare for a science competition, and one of them had a virus (I assume) that hacked TP-Link's firmware to draft it into a botnet. WAN connection would drop every hour for a few minutes, plus unexplained internet traffic while nobody was using it. Resetting firmware did not help, installing DD-WRT fixed it once and for all.
- te_chris 10mo agoYes these are the way. Use them to get cheap anker security cams to work as baby monitors while we’re in hotel rooms
- copperx 10mo agoDo you mind expounding on how it has saved you? I'd love to know the practical use cases.
- wateralien 10mo agoWhile 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.
- tomjen3 10mo agoI am apparently dumb. What benefit does this give you, other than a segregated network? Do us hotels typically have exposed Ethernet ports?
- eliseumds 10mo agoI 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.
- forinti 10mo agoI really like my GLi microrouter. https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-usb150/ 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.
- hk1337 10mo agoI 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
- RyJones 10mo agoI carry my GL.iNet GL-E750V2 all over the world.
- dwardu 10mo agoIs there a 5g dongle I can connect to it? I’ve been searching to no avail
- dionian 10mo agoshould I be concerned this is Chinese-made? And will the UniFi have similar feature set?