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Unifi Travel Router

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Re: Unifi Travel Router

#311

Post by bentcorner »

cosmosgenius wrote: post #70
wateralien wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#312

Post by dxxvi »

baggy_trough wrote: post #55

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.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#313

Post by bronco21016 »

QuiEgo wrote: post #288

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".

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#314

Post by dheera »

QuiEgo wrote: post #288

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.

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.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#315

Post by QuiEgo »

bronco21016 wrote: post #313
QuiEgo wrote: post #288

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 tinke…

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)_/¯.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#316

Post by rpcope1 »

amluto wrote: post #129
hakfoo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

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 ef…

Honestly 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.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#317

Post by gunalx »

jasonkester wrote: post #179
guiambros wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Also the free tier is sufficient for basically anything non power-user or enterprice.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#318

Post by kstrauser »

QuiEgo wrote: post #288

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.

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.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#319

Post by kstrauser »

guiambros wrote: post #78
wateralien wrote: post #2

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).

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.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#320

Post by kstrauser »

bentcorner wrote: post #311
cosmosgenius wrote: post #70

Earlier 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.

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 capa…

Hotels in Las Vegas typically charge around $15/day per connected device. Want to download a new book on your Kobo and play Diablo for a few minutes? That’ll be $30, please!

That’s the real win of a travel router, IMO.

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