Disclaimer: I hate cruises and the entire industry, but ended up getting roped into a few before COVID by weird family dynamics.

I found a portable router to be pretty handy on cruise ships. The only Internet available is through the ship’s WiFi, and the Internet package I had limited connectivity to a single connected device per cabin. The travel router would be the single MAC and allow all our devices to connect. I was also able to share with family in the next cabin over.

A few months ago I stayed in a hotel for about a week and I couldn’t get my Nintendo Switch to connect through their Wi-Fi. My Switch also doesn’t work on my phone’s hotspot for some reason, even though other devices connect and work fine. Anyway, that scenario would’ve been nice for a travel router, but I didn’t bring it with me on that trip.

I just think they’re neat!

The wireguard tunnel is what I’m most interested in. Having that, and then my pihole, be handed out via DHCP is worth $50. More than that is a harder sell.

I use a gl.inet Mango for work. I’m a field tech for industrial machines, I connect the router to the machine’s LAN (if it doesn’t have a switch, the two ports on the Mango come in handy, I just insert it in an existing connection) and I have wireless to the PLCs, allowing me to walk around the installation to check things with my laptop.

Bonus point for the wifi client that allows me to connect to a customer’s wifi or my phone’s hotspot and also have internet on my laptop for mails, etc.

The other day I used it to connect to three different subnets on three machines, one on one port, and two on the other with a switch, again with wifi client for internet.

I could understand them a decade or more ago when not every phone was Hotspot ready, but now days I’d just use PDANet