So I picked up one of those cool little travel routers. The new one from Ubiquiti. This thing is neat.

A Traveling Router?

The main questions people have about a travel router, is “what” and “why”. A travel router, is a router you take with you, when you travel. You connect all of your things to it, and then connect the router to some random network. Be it a hotel, an airport, or a random gas station.

The why gets a little more interesting. Instead of connecting all your devices to the airport WiFi, and dealing with the “Subscribe for faster speed”¹ captive portal on all of them, you connect just the router. Then, all of your things connect to it. And they don’t deal with the captive portal.

Is this incredibly niche? Yes. But this little thing has a couple extra features up its sleeve.

Small But Capable

For starters, this thing is small. Here it is on top of a keyboard.

Despite its size, it packs two ethernet ports. Using the cool folding jack port style. You also get two USB type C ports. One for power, and the other one for tethering to a phone.

The only thing you don’t get, is a battery. So pack one with you, when you travel. You should probably do that anyway.

Thinking With Portals

The main question I had, was how it deals with captive portals.

To test this, I packed up, and headed off for the airport. Ok, I didn’t, that’s a little much, even for me (but I wanted to). I simply spun up a new network and SSID on my UniFi system, and put it behind a captive portal.

Connecting the UTR to the new network, the app prompted me to deal with the portal. It forced my phone to connect to the travel router, then served the portal through a little web server running on it. While at the same time, showing a message on the built in screen.

Once the portal was happy, I was in. And nothing else I connected to the travel router, had to deal with the portal. So yeah, it deals with them pretty well.

Thoughts

There’s a fair bit more this thing can do. Like cloning a MAC address when joining a WiFi network, VPNing back to your home network, and probably more. This thing is pretty flexible².

I can’t wait to give a real spin next time I go flying.