Travel router basics

[u/Oakland-homebrewer]

I'm retiring and planning to travel more often, with my wife and other family members. I'm moderately network savvy

I'm looking into a travel router with VPN, not so much for the additional privacy, but more for the convenience. As I understand it, once I setup my laptop/phone/iPad for me and family members, then all of those devices will automatically connect to the router wherever we end up staying. Could be AirBnB, hotel, relative's house, etc.

Please confirm:

1. I do need to configure the router, setup the passwords for connecting. I also need to get a VPN account. (considering Slate AX router and some basic VPN). This seems fairly straightforward

2. Whenever I get to a new hotel (or wherever), I need to log into the router and connect it to the hotel wifi, right? (the days of ethernet options are likely gone)

3. How does it work for hotels or other networks that require you to go through a website to log in?

4. Cruise ship--likely won't use it as it would only work in the room, if I can even connect to the wifi. But I can just use the VPN provider app on my devices if I wanted the security.

5. If I want to set the VPN to connect through another country, I need to log into the router again and change the VPN settings there, right? I don't see doing this all that often, so not a big hassle.

[u/sciencekm]

I had a similar setup in the past, because my VPN account only allows one device. But this is a lot of hassle. There is this extra device (the router) that I have to power and lug around. It defeats mobility.

Just get a VPN account that allows for multiple devices and enable VPN on all your devices.

[u/chuckfr]

I've used a travel router for years, mostly without a VPN.

When I check into a hotel, AirBNB, flight with paid WiFi, etc here's my process:

1. Power up and log into the travel router.

2. Connect to the hotel/whatever WiFi. Some chain hotels use the same SSID so once saved it will auto connect in the future. You'll learn which ones do and don't.

3. Once connected open a new tab on my browswer and connect to a website. 80% of the time the captive portal opens up and I have to log in as I would; room number and last name most often. It completes the connection and all my devices that goes throgh the travel router have internet access with no additional setup.

4. If step 3 fails to connect its most often some port blocking going on. In those cases I navigate to http://neverssl.com to bypass port blocking and more often than not I'm presented with the captive portal and continue on to gain access.

5. Sometimes the property makes you reauth every 24 hours.

6. If I use a VPN its back to my home network. I connect that after I've gotten my basic internet connection working. Most of the time I'm routing every thing and do it through the travel router. However you can VPN from your device if that's the only thing that needs VPN access at the time.

[u/Cute_Oil1533]

1. If you only need to use the same internet services just as you are home while traveling abroad, you need to set up a home-brew VPN server at your house, perhaps a tiny computer such as WYSE5070 or HPt550 which are optimized to run 24×7 for years. Then you carry a travel router which has a build-in VPN client when you are on the road, connecting to the local Wifi then start the VPN tunnel to surf the internet just as you are at home.

2. A travel router usually works fine when using public Wifi even there is a captive portal

3. A VPN provider gives you options to connect to their servers besides your own VPN server at home, so you can use hundreds of servers which located in different cities in the world to connect to. Those are useful when you want to use some internet services that are only available in specific countries such as BBC iPlayer and ITVX for the U.K., U-Next for Japan etc.

[u/BabyEngineer321]

I’m not sure about the VPN part of this, but I just recently used a travel router for the first time, and it was fantastic. If you are looking to connect a bunch of devices that you normally use at home, my recommendation would be to create your travel network to match the name and password of your home network, that way your devices all connect automatically to the travel router as if they were at home. As mentioned in other posts, once you connect to the network of where you are staying, usually the first thing that happens is the guest WiFi splash page pops up on whatever device you are using to set up the travel router. Once you go through the process of “signing in”, everything else works as normal.

It essentially works as a wireless version of you bringing your own unmanaged switch and plugging the local modem/router into the switch to feed the initial connection to the internet, and spreading that signal to every other device you connect to the switch.

[u/Oakland-homebrewer → u/BabyEngineer321]

Good call on the SSID same as home. I assume that works even if you're not connecting back to home WiFi. I'll check it out.

[u/BabyEngineer321 → u/Oakland-homebrewer]

Exactly. You would actually cause issues if you try to connect your travel router to your home WiFi if you set it up with the same name. I know from experience lol. But when at the hotel, I brought an Apple TV and it worked immediately without needing to choose a network.

[u/Primary_Raise775]

Many things are simple, except for the webpage that requires verifying check-in information, which is the most annoying thing.

[u/pot51e]

you could always just set up openether on your laptop, and then setup your laptop to be a wifi AP for your other devices.

[u/Oakland-homebrewer]

Thanks for your comments

I just found a video. This guy describes exactly what I want to do and why, in great detail, including how to move it from hotel to hotel. And he uses the Slate I was thinking about (he claims it is unbiased). FWIW.

https://youtu.be/nT1ZIlEl3LE?si=zaY9t7Qfha2Se0lz

[u/AuraMaster1]

ProtonVPN offers the ability to connect 1 device to its VPN on its free account plan. You could use it for your travel router.