Following on from Tuesday's deal for travel routers, I set up a camel's alert for the GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX) and got notified this morning of a 28% off deal for Prime members.
These seems to review well so grab one if you are in the market.
CamelCamelCamel.
Can you share info on that please?
you know, the thing
Oh THAT thing. I thought it might have been the other thing.
These are great (I paid the same price when it was on sale at the start of the year) - I took it on a month long trip to Europe earlier this year and then my daughter took it across Europe and the UK for two months (it was particularly handy for her since she was travelling with a group of friends for half the time)
Dumb question: why would anyone need a travel router? Isn't a mobile hotspot a proper alternative?
Its handy if you have multiple devices you want to run through a vpn. Dont have to individually set up each device. Also easy way to share a single login to hotel wifi. These routers are running a modified version of openwrt so you can do a lot more than most garbage routers out there.
IYKYK
imagine a family, with kids.
each has a phone
there's also some tablets
maybe a laptop
Use cases:
go on holidays
FREE WIFI
enter password that's really long and needlessly complicated to 7 devices - or one?
Adguard home on the go so you dont have to buy 100 games for your kids to play on the tablet, instead use the free version with blocked ads.
VPN to home, in case, you need to access some stuff at home, like home assistant integrations, surveilance cameras, media, etc.
portable nas
attach a nvme ssd and tadaa, who needs internet for media.
I don't have a travel router, but this is what I do for some of the use case above.
My Samsung phone has had Wifi sharing for a while, ie. if the wifi is on when you turn on mobile hotspot, it shares your wifi connection and if you turn wifi off, the mobile hotpot uses your 4G/5G connection. This was particularly handy when I went on a cruise, where I only needed to pay for one internet connection, and had about 5 kids following me around(more followers than I have on social media!). Also FYI, earlier Samsung phones need to have the wifi-sharing setting turned on, otherwise when you turn on mobile hotspot, it automatically disables your wifi connection.
As for the kids tablet, I assume it is an Android tablet, I use Adguard DNS, where I put in the Adguard DNS hostname in the Private DNS setting, so no matter which wifi the tablet is connected to, no ads in games.
As for VPN to home, my ISP uses CGNAT, so I can't technically VPN home directly. I use an app called Zerotier and create a virtual private network for the devices that needed to talk to each other. It works like Hamachi, particularly good back in the day when you wanted to game with your friends on a "local" network. I admit not as good as VPN to home, but works well for my purposes, ie. needing to access the home assistant server at home.
I don't have a use for portable NAS, so can't comment on that.
I love it for having all my devices connected to it and only have to connect the router to a hotel's wifi once. Plus I can easily add a Chromecast, etc for devices that don't support captive portals. It now comes with me whenever I travel.
Great deal. I paid $118 from AliExpress last week and am still awaiting delivery
its a whole lot larger than the mango. reckon it's worth it for the size/weight tradeoff?
Depends on use. VPN speed is better than the Mango. This has higher power requirements. Mango is out of support. This is dual band. etc
https://www.gl-inet.com/products/compare/
https://www.gl-inet.com/support/firmware-versions/
Ooopps…Mango (GL-MT300N) is out of support, Mango v2 (GL-MT300N-V2) is in support
These are neat, the slightly better Slate AX is also discounted currently: https://www.amazon.com.au/GL-iNet-GL-AXT1800-Pocket-Sized-Ex…
Beryl AX might be the value sweet spot though with this price
another reason to prefer beryl would be weight.
beryl - 11.5 x 8 x 3 cm; 196 Grams
slate - 12.5 x 8.2 x 3.6 cm; 540 Grams
There's also comments around about the Slate overheating and crashing, which turned me off a bit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GlInet/comments/143gjdx/beryl_ax_gl…
My Slate AX overheated, ran hot, and crashed. Maybe a bad one? My Beryl AX is great, and I think you will be happy with it.
Same here
I received one of these from Aliexpress a couple of weeks ago to replace my Mango, paid just over $100AUD delivered. Not an AU plug from there though, but I just use a single Anker charger for this and my laptop anyway. I use it when remote, on public WiFi, etc to VPN back home. Pretty happy with it, VPN speed is good, no more issues on Teams meetings compared to the Mango.
Does that router support VPN? It doesn't seem to.
it's not a travel router, so not really comparable
Will this be ideal, lets say I have a wifi public/ family house internet, will this unit get pass the Great Firewall? ( CHINA )
If you mean VPN back to your home connection - it can as it supports wireguard/openvpn and tailscale out of the box.
That said, I found that unreliable.
This router can install Openclash (see github) though, so if you’re technically inclined, you can set up alternate connections through a provider like wannaflix.
May be a dumb question but could you use this for a LAN only (no internet) for home assistant with zigbee devices? Looking to have a separate local network for home assistant so it can keep running if the internet stops working.
Yes, you can use it for that.
Great thanks heaps. Trying to make sure when I do set up home assistant it can run without the internet.
wait that's possible ?
my kogan smarterhome lights don't work when i lose nbn connection haha.
no google assistant control if it offline
would be good to have dual wan.
Is this only used when connect to the LAN connection in a hotel?
Usually the hotel LAN connection asks you to sign in guest username and password like WIFI?
No, that is not the only use.
It really depends on the network configuration of the Hotel. If they provide a LAN port, usually it doesn't require a captive portal login, it will assign you a LAN ip address when you connect, at least that's what my experience taught me.
If you need to run it as a Wi-Fi repeater or if it does require a login, you can connect and authenticate to the Wi-Fi/LAN using whatever PC/mobile you have first, and then set the router's MAC address to the same as the device you just made connection.
So this will work as a wifi extender? I live in a granny flat that isn’t attached to the main house. Could I put this as close to the main house, connect wirelessly then broadcast that signal in my flat?
You could - but it may not extend the range all that much compared to buying a built-for-purpose extender.
Yeah fair call. I guess Amazon have good returns so maybe I'll give it a go. Thanks for the reply!
Thanks OP. Been keeping my eyes peeled for a deal on this. Bought.
Can I connect connect it to a mobile hotspot? And share with family
Sure, why not. A mobile hotspot is just another Wireless Access Point. Connect the router to it and share away.
Thank you
I stacked it with the $20 Amazon thing