GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 (Opal) Portable WiFi Travel Router, Mini VPN Wireless Router for Fiber Optic Modem, Mobile Internet WiFi Repeater, Dual Band Openwrt Computer Routers, Home/Business/RV/Cruise

Sometimes things just delight you. This is one of the products. On a recent trip to Europe, I stayed at many hotels. It was nice to connect one device and share the connection instantly with all devices. Easy to connect to, easy UI, fast, reliable, takes little power from USB-C so you can even power it with a small power bank. USB drive to stream own media. Built in VPN. …. Wow wow wow. It even saved me one time. I was at a nice small cozy hotel but their WiFi only worked outside my door (in the hall). No problem. I simply connected the router to a small battery bank and left it outside of my door. My devices connected to it and the router was closer to the hotel WiFi transmitter so I could use internet in the room. I know it’s not a topical example but it was so awesome to be saved this way. I use it each time I work from a coffee shop too. Why not. One WiFi connection, VPN, all my devices go online and are safe (VPN).

I wish I could give this SIX stars. Not only is this a VERY CAPABLE portable router, it is a super-powerful, user friendly, intuitive, whole-home router. When I bought this, I was merely looking for something that would allow me to port forward through a VPN and over-come my mobile provider's unforgiving home internet hardware and configuration. Boy did I get my 40 bucks worth! Not only does it support OpenVPN from a gigantic line of VPN providers, you can manipulate virtually every single setting in the thing and it makes my cellular home internet viable for my home lab. The router interface itself is based on OpenWrt (a lightweight Linux distro for routers and things) and has been cultivated with both the novice, security conscious user AND the advanced, home-brew, hobbiest network engineer in mind. You can setup multiple VPN profile types to support all kinds of needs and quickly switch between them. Advanced ad blocking, interfaces with dynamic DNS services, advanced firwalling, distributed networks and VLANs, and basically anything else you can think of that you might need. I'll try using my phone to tether with it soon. Right now, I'm having too much fun with the available items that are just standard. Because its software is a lightweight Linux system, there are hundreds of installable packages for this. If you have experience working inside Debian, you can run this thing and make it as powerful or as ubiquitous as you want or need. I'm anxious to find out if I can connect external storage to it because it's only got 128 MBs of storage on board. Don't let the size and price point fool you. In experienced hands, this thing is a NetGear & TP-Link exterminator that will NOT bog down your network.

This router may be small in size but it works great. Makes port forwarding easy as well as adding static routes. Seems to have all the things you would expect in a pricey router but at a much lower cost. Its made as a travel router so you can pick up wifi signals and bridge it into your network. I use it as a home router and it is better than many more expensive ones. I believe it runs open source software so you can also putty into it and manually configure things.

4-1/2 stars . My first travel router is working great! I got this for occasional travel and coffee shop use. Set up is fairly easy but there are a few steps to go through and it did take a little google-ing to figure out how to set up my Surfshark VPN with the device. But now that it’s set, it’s easy to enable or disable my VPN if needed. I am using it in repeater mode in a hotel, and the family are all connected. I thought I’d be able to plug in drive and stream media through it. Read something after purchase that this was enabled via a previous software version, and may work in a beta, but not sure. Maybe user error. I am able to stream media from my Jellyfin server and that worked fine. For the price and VPN security (with separate VPN provider) this is pretty cool. Good entry level solution to see if this is something beneficial for you. You can always upgrade to a higher end model later.

Small form factor, with a small case it doesn't take up much space in a case or bag. Range could span a few hotel rooms easy on high power, low power is enough for the room and into the hall. It connects via wifi, Ethernet, or a USB tethering. It has a built in OpenVPN and Wiregaurd client and a hardware switch to enable them, so you can tunnel traffic out of the shared upstream network. The interface is basic, but easy to use. You can use OpenWRT directly too if you prefer more advanced options. I've used this on trips for days and is more limited by the upstream hotel connection than this device. I've used it to stream movies, play games via Parsec and upload photos and videos without any issues.

This baby rocks! It does EVERYTHING! It is one of the easiest routers I have ever setup. Well documented online and ample support on the website. I could go on and on about how much I love this router, but I want to explain about the "bonus." There is a usb port on the router. I did a little research and you can turn this baby into a NAS or network drive with a usb thumb drive! I just happened to have a 1TB usb drive laying around, so I gave it a try. I found out on their website that I needed a router upgrade to install the app to handle the network drive. I had the latest "stable" upgrade, but needed a beta upgrade for the app. I installed the beta upgrade and everything worked like a charm. I set everything up in the routers setup program. I connected my new network (NAS) drive to Q4OS linux in my shop and to Windows 7 in my study. Pretty much all NAS, network and ethernet drives are well over 100 bucks! This baby is a super cheap alternative with the addition of an inexpensive thumb drive!!! I LOVE it! Beats all the Belkin, Linksys, Cisco, AT&T Spectrum and other routers I have ever owned or dealt with! I will definitely be buying another when this one dies. I have owned mine for about a year now with zero issues. It has stronger wifi than the AT&T router in my home. I got this to extend the range of my Wifi to my shop and garden. It has far exceeded all of my expectations!

So far, just by following the video instructions for tethering iPhone's internet (using iphone's hotspot) everything went very satisfactorily. I was able to set up my Wyze pan cam in my office , at work, where I usually have an enterprise wifi connection (that doesnt allow any private wireless cameras to their wifi network). By using my iPhone's hotspot I could use this router to broadcast a wifi signal that my wifi camera could detect. I used the browser from my iphone 11, to keep things easy. If you log into the Admin portal (gateway) while using a computer, the user interface might look different and can complicate things for those who are not used to working with computers. I made sure I turned off the 5Ghz bandwidth because my wifi camera only connects to 2.4Ghz. Then I followed the steps from the video shown on here (on amazon), where pictures show the features of the router. Then I renamed the SSID of router to make it less obvious on the network from work. I also changed the password for the SSID to something else because by default the password is "goodlife", and anyone could use your wifi if they see your default SSID (GL - ....) and google the manufacturer's default password for that device. In case you wanna use it (as I did) to connect your security wifi camera on your iphone in your office , or even in your car, while using your phone's hotspot, you can follow the instructions from the video of this router from amazon. You'll have to connect your iphone to the router at some point , according to the instructional video (I used the USB port too) , and then put your Wyze pan camera in set up mode, follow the steps for setting up your camera, and you're connected. I noticed that the connection might not be stable based on how good your Hotspot connection is in that area. That causes my router to show a "growing blue light " on the router as if it would keep try to get internet from the iphone. My LTE data in my office is bad because the building affects my cell signal. But Im glad because I can still record with my security camera even after i disconnect from the camera to leave home for the day. The camera keeps recording after that on its 256GB microSD card. And I can review the recordings next day on my phone's Wyze app, when I connect to the router. So, the point is that this router helped me achieve what other pocket routers like TPLink, could not. The easy user interface for tethering made the difference, plus the instructional video. I gotta say that this router still requires a basic willingness to learn how to use a computer or an iphone, because even the concept of "tethering" could be too difficult to people if they 're not used to spending some time with experimenting with technology. Shalom!

First off, I think that this is a good product. It works well at 5GHz and 2.4GHz, and is easy to get up and running, at least for someone who knows at least a little about networked devices. The device itself is small and unobtrusive and will probably be an inoffensive addition to the average home or office. Now I'll mention a few issues: I'll have to ding the product for its documentation. Basically you have to get the device up and running and then do all configuration from a browser interface. There's a tiny getting-started guide on paper. I do this sort of thing for a living, so I had no problem with this, but it really feels as if a newbie could easily be utterly at sea over this. It gets worse in that many people will probably get the device up and running, and then fail to go to the extra step of changing the WiFi password. You'd think that there would be a huge, red warning in the getting-started guide telling people to change this, but there isn't. It's actually even worse than this because even when you're using their web-based admin UI, it's easy to get the WiFi configuration wrong. It turns out that the configuration for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz sides of the WiFi configuration are independent in the UI, with the 2.4GHz part lower down on the web page. When I set mine up, I was using a small screen, and the config for the 2.4GHz was scrolled off the bottom of the screen, and I didn't notice that it even existed. (Why would you expect two different WiFi password setting steps? I've never seen one like this). Anyway, I initially set things up, changing the name of the device only to discover that the default name of the device still showed up on my list of available network devices along with the name I had given to the 5GHz side. I found that I was still able to log into the device using the default password on the 2.4GHz side. This sort of thing is shameful. The world is full of IoT devices which provide possible hazards to our home environments. We should all complain vociferously about devices which don't take our network security seriously. The other problem I ran into was with the physical design of the device. I planned to install the device in my garage, where I have hard-wired Ethernet, but have always had terrible WiFi connectivity. I had assumed that this device, like most other small electronic devices, would have those little keyhole shaped holes in the bottom to let one wall-mount the device on a couple of screws. No such luck. What?? Because of this, I ended up having to make a little shelf out of a scab of 2x4 to mount it, and zip-tie it to the shelf. This is a rather worse state of affairs that I would have liked. All of the connector sockets are on the back of the device. With anything plugged in, the effective size of the device ends up being a few inches deeper than the actual physical size of the device. If I were able to hang the device flat against the wall, it'd be fine to have the plugs hanging below the device (though the power cord doesn't lock in and might fall out). Mounted on a little shelf horizontally, there's no way to fit the device into a stud bay and have the front facing forwards. I ended up mounting it sideways. It's a little offensive-looking, but I can live with that - it's just a garage. For want of a couple of holes molded into the base of the device, I ended up getting annoyed. So, the bottom line is that this seems to be an entirely competent device marred by a simple production design issue and by shameful documentation of the important security issues associated with installing a device like this.