it says travel but not supporting LTE/5G
Travel to a hotel.
Unifi Travel Router
161–170 of 437 posts
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#162Available 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 d…
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.
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ru…
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.
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ru…
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.
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#165I 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.
What is the benefit of this over, for example, an iPhone hotspot?
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.
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that actually work? I don't think you can both have hotspot on and be connected to another network.
Most newer (or at least new + expensive) phones can share their wifi connection via hotspot. 2.4gh only though I think.
Do you know what’s the technical term to search if a phone has that capability? Asking for an iPhone
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can accomplish this via one access point instead of configuring wireguard on N*5 family devices.
Why do you need to config wireguard on each device? Connect your phone to your vpn and share the wifi. Works on my android. Struggling to see the value proposition for this device.
Does it require specific VPN apps or root? I tried connecting laptop to phone hotspot and even though phone was connected to VPN, laptop wasn't.
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Convenient to connect all devices to one WiFi. E.g. baby camera is on same WiFi as laptop etc.
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Although it does sound really nice from a user experience perspective I'm really hesitant with carrying a device with me that without any (additional) authentication would gain access to my home network wherever you plug it in. Would hate losing it or have it be taken from me.
Re: Unifi Travel Router
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Does that actually work? I don't think you can both have hotspot on and be connected to another network.
Works fine, yup.