Why You Need a Pocket Router: Hotels, Airports, Airplanes, Cruise Ships - Stay Connected Anywhere!

I didn't even know that I needed one of these but if you ever stay in hotels or travel on cruise ships or airplanes you need one too coming right up in Dave's Garage I'm going to show you what it is how to set it up and why you should get [Music] one hey I'm Dave welcome to my shop I'm Dave plumber a retired operating systems engineer from Microsoft going back to the MS Doss and Windows 95 days and today we're going to take a look at an genious product known as the pocket router or travel router back when I was at Microsoft in the 90s I also sold a number of shareware utilities online as a little side business which we had all agreed would be okay when I got hired that meant that every day I had to process shareware registrations and send out the license keys and as kind of a oneman show back then I was bound to do them every day even if I was on vacation and so even if I went on a cruise I'd have to somehow get internet access and process the orders every day and let me tell you internet access on a cruise ship in the 9s was a brutal thing I'm sure it was powered by an acoustic coupled modem somewhere on the bridge with one of those old Com or rotary dial phones connected to it it was then shared with a few thousand other guests and if you were lucky enough to get any connection at all it quickly faded on Alaskan cruises as you went further north pretty soon even sending and receiving basic text emails was problematic or at times simply not possible now it improved slowly over the years and I was recently on a ship where the network was Serv by starlink and it was revolutionary I mean I was streaming NFL football games in high def in my state room something unimaginable just a few years ago but no matter how good or bad the internet is or isn't there's one thing you can rely on it's going to be expensive on board a ship and they charge per device per day and they only let you have one device logged in at a time this is often true for some hotels as well which can charge per device and limit the number of simultaneous devices if you're traveling with your family everyone needs their own connection often at extra cost and what they'd really like to do is be able to connect not just their phones but also their laptops and iPads and stream decks and whatever else and that's where the pocket router or travel router comes in it's a small smart device that includes Wi-Fi antennas and a few landan ports its purpose is to take whatever internet connection you can manage to get be it a hardware ethernet connection a public or a private Wi-Fi or even Tethered to the 5G or LTE on your phone and then share it out in a fresh new Wi-Fi secure network all of its own you can have a practically unlimited number of devices connected and as far as the hotel or airplane or cruise ship knows it's all coming from one device there are dozens of such routers available on Amazon and I only needed one so rather than doing a big Roundup episode of all the losers I figured I'd just pick the one that's best for me and I'm a middle-aged Tech Enthusiast with a wife and four kids all with multiple devices so I didn't need it to do anything fancy I just wanted it to be easy to set up and reliable once I did so so I did my own research as people are fond of saying and I decided that the axt 1800 from ginet was the best choice for me in fact I like it so much that you might start to think this is a sponsored episode but that's silly these things are only about 100 bucks and I'm not going to sell my credibility and oo sincerity for the highest bidder for 100 bucks in free hardware and that means I paid for this little unit with my own Cold Hard Cash whistl and Diesel has nothing on Dave's Garage it's time to see the hardware okay here we have the axt 1800 also known as the Slate ax on the of the Box we got a list of bullet features like Wi-Fi 6 open wrt 3 gbit ports USB 3 and so on let's open up the box and have a look inside inside we get a standard little pamphlet and a QR code we can scan for some registration opportunity apparently and inside this little wrap we find the actual pocket router which is indeed small enough to fit in your pocket supports a power port USB 3 three land ports and a light on the front if we flip up the little antennas we get a better look at how it will sit on your desk Inside the Box we get a quality 5volt 3 amp power supply it is UL listed so it won't huff and puff and blow down your house the only disappointing part is that they only give you the US adapter and what are the odds you would want to say travel with your travel adapter and therefore would benefit from having the European and British standard plug Styles included in the Box for the pennies they must cost but alas no but that small oversight aside everything seems to be of high quality including the unit itself so long story short you connect this router to the internet however you can get it Hotel Wi-Fi public ethernet port Lan port with internet access or even by tethering it to your phone over the USB port you can also plug in a cellular modem if you happen to have one of those once you've connected the router to the internet you connect all of your devices like phones and laptops and iPads and so on to your own private little Wi-Fi network on the router itself and it combines all of your connections into one internet con connection it also means that devices like Apple TV suddenly become useful in hotels what do I mean well normally if you just took your Apple TV and plugged it into the HDMI port of the hotel TV that much would work I mean you'd get a picture but when it comes time to connect to the hotel Wi-Fi so that you can actually play content if you were to do it directly you'd be stuck in what's known as the Walled Garden or in the captive portal which is where you usually find that page that requires you accept the hotel's terms of use and conditions before you get a full connection and since the Apple TV doesn't have a web browser you can't open that page and accept it from that Mac address and so you're pretty much hooped what I used to do was to spoof the MAC address of the Apple TV on my laptop get my laptop connected break out of the Walled Garden or captive portal then disconnect the laptop and reconnect the Apple TV that was the real owner of the now authorized Mac address that would usually work but it's a lot of effort and configuration but don't say you didn't learn something this episode the travel router solves all of this because once it's connected to the hotel Wi-Fi you accept the wall Garden through it on your laptop or phone and then everyone who connects to your private Wi-Fi Apple TV included just gets a clean connection to the internet with no captive portal so the Apple TV doesn't even know it's in a hotel and it can see the internet and that's all it cares so now that you're safely connected via the travel router to the hotel or cruise ship Wi-Fi you can connect as many devices as you like to your router well I think the actual limit is 150 the way they have the IP ranges set up but that should still be plenty realistically in a family of four if everybody had a laptop and an iPad it's maybe a dozen devices but it's handy for Any number greater than one you're not limited to connecting the router to the internet over Wi-Fi however it also supports direct ethernet connections if you can find a port in your room and that works really well because the Slate ax that we're looking at here supports Wi-Fi 6 which means you'll probably get better speeds connected through the travel router than you likely would through the hotel's older Wi-Fi setup in addition to connecting the router through Wi-Fi and ethernet you can also connect it by tether ring it to your phone it supports Android and iOS and on the Apple I just connected the phone to the router via my standard USB to lightning charging cable as soon as I indicated to trust the router on the phone's main screen I simply turned on tethering on the router and it immediately connected the tethering icon appears on the phone as well to confirm the connection but wait there's more you can also get one of those USB cellular modems and plug it directly into the router though there's only a single USB port so you may have to choose between either tethering or a cellular modem at the same time but even with that limitation it means you could connect it by tethering ethernet and wireless all at the same time and the travel router will seamlessly aggregate those into a single connection for you you can do so by load balancing across them or in simple failover mode where you pick the priority and that way it uses one until it fails over and then switches to the next another important feature of the travel router is the ability to connect to VPN for example if you were traveling to the UK and wanted to watch something on American Netflix you might be denied based on your location and if you used an app like nordvpn on your phone or laptop that would only solve it for that single device with a travel router you can connect the router itself to your VPN provider and that way everything that goes over the router is in turn routed through the VPN connection and that's true for all the devices that are connected via the router so your Apple TV will also appear to be located in whatever local you connect to with the VPN another compelling feature that uses VPN is openvpn support this allows you to set up an openvpn server in your house and then the travel router can connect to it once it does so all traffic that goes over the router in your hotel room is actually sent back and through your home internet as if you were local at home this has the nice feature of giving you secure access to the computers printers and other devices on your homeand all of your local restricted contents will be served up as if you were at home because in a very real sense you still are your traffic will all originate not from the hotel but from your home Netflix and YouTube and so on will all believe that you're still at home and since you're home is very unlikely to be on any list of public VPN servers it's also unlikely that streaming services would ever be able to detect that you're operating over a VPN naturally routing all of your traffic back through your home wherever that may be introduces an extra layer into your Communications and that will increase latency and decrease throughput it's fine for streaming less so for gaming at home I've got a symmetric 5 GB internet connection so it's easily fast enough to handle any traffic that I can usually generate I even tried it on an airplane while connected to the VPN over the travel router I was able to access my home desktops via screen sharing and windows remote desktop I could see my printers my cameras and everything else from my airplane seat and of course all this takes place over a password protected encrypted SSL channel the Slate ax has a very handy feature in the form of a slider switch on the side of the unit you can configure this switch in the router setup to do a few different things but I've set mind to connect to the VPN when the switch is set to on and disconnect when set to off that way I can browse Norm normally until I need the features afforded by operating over VPN and then I just slide the switch on when I need it when you first get your unit you'll need to connect to it to configure it and I find the easiest way is to take a laptop that is not connected to any other network and then join it to the Wi-Fi that the router creates when it's turned on in the bad old days everyone would start out with the same default password like admin but now each unit gets its own secure password and it typically can be found printed on a label on the bottom or the back of the unit in this case it's on the bottom when once you're connected check your network settings to confirm the IP address of your default gateway with the Slate ax it defaults to 192168 8.1 and I faced the added problem that my homeland also uses that subnet for some vlans by the way if you're new to vlans and haven't set them up yet especially for your iot devices be sure to check out my episode on vlans and why you care and that's why I suggested that you start out connected to the router that way it can't conflict with anything else so the first change I made was to change the router to use P range 192168101 but this is only necessary if you have a complex home network that overlaps with the router's default range for most people you just plug it in and browse to the 192168 8.1 address the next step is to get the router connected to the internet I'm going to go hard on this step and connect my router to three different internet sources plugged in via Ethernet connected to the Wi-Fi and then tethered over the phone the router can load balance but I'll leave mine set to just failover mode that way it will use the ethernet connection preferentially but it will automatically switch to the Wi-Fi or the tethered connection as needed if you're connecting the router's Wi-Fi to a public hotspot there may be a captive portal that you have to connect to that's usually as simple as opening your web browser and it will take you there I say usually because I have seen it get into a state where I couldn't get to the captive portal even by its IP address and I'm not entirely sure how it happened or how I later fixed it but suffice to say there are edge cases apparently you can also turn off DNS rebinding ATT taxs in the DNS settings if they happen to be on and that will help in any event your worst case would be to do the MAC address clothing trick but hopefully it never comes to that one of the cooler features of the USB port is that you can plug a disc or even entire storage array into the USB port you can then enable Samba sharing on the folder and it will be visible in whatever manner you see fit I'll open it up to guest access for the sake of this demo but you can lock it down with user accounts as well so for about $100 plus the cost of whatever storage you attach to it you've got a fully functional Naas and there are models available at a slightly higher cost that support 2.5 GB land ports as well if you don't want to attach a USB stick or external drive and just want to take along and share a few files on your trip the Slate ax also conveniently features a micr SD card slot where you can insert a card containing your desired files and share them just as we did the external drive the fact that the device has just a single USB port worried me a bit so I plugged a small USB hub into it and then connected both a storage drive and my iPhone for tethering at the same time and that worked I tried using the ethernet port that was also present on that Hub wondering if perhaps it would be detected somehow but it was not either way it's good to know you're not limited to a single USB device at a time there's a great deal more that you can configure of course but the details will be specific to the model that you purchase so I won't spend a lot of time rat ho holding on specific settings and configuration we've covered most of the highlights from res sharing a single Wi-Fi on up to network failover and adding a network attached storage device if you found any of today's episode to be interesting or entertaining remember I'm mostly in this for the subs and likes so please be sure to leave me one of each before you go today if you or someone you know may be on the autism spectrum check out the free sample of my book on Amazon it's everything I know about living your best life on the Spectrum thanks for joining me out here in the shop today in the meantime and in between time I hope to see you next time right here in Dave's Garage this little chair will be waiting for one of you and a rock in chair for another who likes to rock and a big arm chair for two to curl up in all next time on Dave's [Music] Garage

Channel: Dave's Garage

Views: 1,088,465

Keywords: travel router, royal caribbean, cruise ship wifi, cruise tips, royal caribbean wifi, cruise ship, best travel router, wifi hotspot, travel router hotspot, portable wifi hotspot, best portable wifi hotspot, royal caribbean cruise, cruise internet, cruise hacks, public wifi, portable router, pocket router, royal caribbean blog, travel router tp link

Id: OYxQ4Lvqn14

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024