Please recommend a small/affordable router for travels

[soulbadguy]

Hello,
I frequently travel for work and i am kinda fed up with the crappy wifi in my hotel rooms. I am looking for a small router/wifi i can pack in my suit case . Currently thinking of getting the asus RT-ACH13 because i have a good experience with it (before upgrading).
Any other recommendation ?

 

[CaptainSTX]

I have had good results using my TP-Link WR700N, but beware that many hotels no longer offered Ethernet connections in their rooms so you have no way to use it as an AP. Today people want and expect WiFi so that seems to be what hotels offer and if they ever had Ethernet in the rooms they no longer support it. I stayed in seven hotels in Greece, Italy and France and never had a chance to use my travel router. Instead, if the hotel's WiFi was bad or expensive I used my T-Mobil hotspot which gave me free unlimited data at 3G speeds in Europe. It was good enough for casual surfing and e-mail but streaming video was unsatisfactory most of the time.

 

[sfx2000]

TP-Link has a few travel routers - won't help with poor location relative to the AP, but still can do firewall/ap duty for your other devices... some are even supported by 3rd party firmware (OpenWRT)

Asus used to carry some interesting WUL devices here in the US, but looks like they've discontinued that product line...

 

[thiggins]

Travel routers are a dying breed. Many hotels now allow multiple devices on Wi-Fi per room. As others has noted, Ethernet options are disappearing since devices road warriors carry don't have Ethernet anyway.

TP-Link has the broadest travel router options. Used to be a huge category for them.

 

[Hildebrand]

I have a similar question. I'm not familiar with "travel routers".
Is there a wireless router, any size, that can search for hotspot 2.0/passpoint signals and in turn become a hotspot itself? For example, connecting to my optimum passpoint (which is hotspot 2.0 from what I understand) with my two laptops and phone for work is spotty. If I can get a wifi router that would connect to optimum passpoint and then I would connect to the router as an Access Point, then that would be sweet. Is this possible?
I've seen programs that allow a laptop to become a hotspot, but they are a spotty solution.

 

[pege63]

Yes Dovado is one of this brands, the models are, Tiny, Tiny AC, PRO AC.
I use this one myself a Air Live N.Mini

 

[doczenith1]

Can the Dovado models connect to a public wifi that uses a captive portal? Seems like I heard that some "travel" routers can do this but haven't been able to confirm.

 

[pege63]

Can the Dovado models connect to a public wifi that uses a captive portal? Seems like I heard that some "travel" routers can do this but haven't been able to confirm.

Yes, usually. You just connect, and then you are sent to the portal with the first device you connect through the Dovado network.

 

[doczenith1]

Does the first device then provide the information so that the Dovado connects to the public wifi? What I'm looking to do is have the Dovado connect to the public wifi as a single device and then provide routing to multiple devices via wireless. I have run into situations where only one device is allowed on hotel wifi and need the aforementioned setup to allow me to connect multiple devices. Another use case would be getting a Chromecast connected to the wifi when captive portals are used.

 

[pege63]

Yes, it does exactly that.
The hotel wifi can only see one device (one MAC-adress).
And you can log in through the portal from your first device, and then use many devices after that.

 

[System Error Message]

here in the UK a lot of hotels only allow 1 or 2 devices.

 

[sfx2000]

In my experience here in the US - two are generally allowed on the Hilton chains...

(Hilton partners up with att in many of their brands, so 3g/4g phones/tablets get attwifi for free if an ATT customer, so that takes a bit of pressure off if traveling with laptop, tablet, and phone)

 

[doczenith1]

The Flamingo in Las Vegas only allowed two devices. I had to BT tether my phone so my tablet had connectivity. My buddy's phone was the other device.

Does anyone know of any other brands that can do this that are available in the US of A?

 

[sfx2000]

One could always run OpenWRT on a Pi with two WiFi USB devices (one for the WAN side, and the other to run hostapd for the LAN clients).

Chaos Calmer supports Pi2, there's support for Pi3 in the "unstable" Designated Driver branch...

(did a project on Pi2 on CC using a 3g USB modem as WAN in a similar context last winter with another forum member)

 

[System Error Message]

One could always run OpenWRT on a Pi with two WiFi USB devices (one for the WAN side, and the other to run hostapd for the LAN clients).

Chaos Calmer supports Pi2, there's support for Pi3 in the "unstable" Designated Driver branch...

(did a project on Pi2 on CC using a 3g USB modem as WAN in a similar context last winter with another forum member)

thats an excellent idea but the pi only has 100Mb/s ports, they should check odroid, udoo and asus thinkerboard. There may be other boards too but any of this solution even raspberry pi requires time and effort to set it up first.

 

[sfx2000]

thats an excellent idea but the pi only has 100Mb/s ports, they should check odroid, udoo and asus thinkerboard. There may be other boards too but any of this solution even raspberry pi requires time and effort to set it up first.

On Hotel WiFi - 100Mbps is more that good enough...