GL.iNet GL-MT300N-V2 (Mango) Portable Mini Travel Wireless Pocket VPN WiFi Router - 2X Ethernet Ports | USB 2.0 | OpenWrt | OpenVPN/Wireguard for Public & Hotel Wi-Fi | Easy to Set up via Admin Panel

This is the best travel modem out there. It's tiny. It's light. It's full featured and incredibly configurable through a simple administrative panel that's easy and intuitive to use. It uses open source OpenWrt firmware but the Admin Panel tames all the complexity. It's just so darn useful. The main function is the repeater mode where you can login to a public Wi-Fi connection, and the device creates another Wi-Fi connection you or your entire party can login to. It's also easy to add a VPN (OpenVPN or Wireguard) to the connection and has a little toggle switch to enable and disable the VPN as you want. It can get Internet from any Wi-Fi source or through tethering from your smartphone or from a cellular data dongle if you have one of those. It also has an ethernet WAN port if your Internet connection is wired and an Internet LAN port if you want to connect your computer wired to the router. They thought of everything. The configuration panel makes all these various setups easy to select and configure. It's a really good device and so small and easy to travel with. Whatever your situation, this little device works and works well. It's 2 Ghz only but has 300 mbps throughput. No power supply is included, just the USB power cord and a short flat Ethernet cable are included. Since it supports OpenWrt, you can install custom firmware if you want and use this for something else. It has a built in system to install factory firmware from scratch if you have to. The GL.iNet people have done a great job with this little thing.

I confess I'm a Linux user... but this thing is awesome. It's the Swiss army knfe of routers, inexpensive and tiny. It's based on OpenWRT (a good thing) The FCC site shows it has two F antennas (simple but effective) driving a MIMO chip. I was initially disappointed it didn't have external antennas but after using it it's a killer. I sometimes work in my cargo trailer (a Faraday cage) and it works great, outperforming my USB two external antenna wifi dongle. With a bit of work you can harden this thing even more against snooping and attacks. The only negative is that it doesn't play well with stock NordVPN but there are ways around this (.ovpn config file) ..Tom

We purchased the product so we could use it on a cruise. As people may know, cruise ships charge for each device you connect to the WiFi, so we should be able to connect a router, and then connect our phones and tablets to the router.1. That "shared repeater" part worked. As long as we were in the room, we were able to connect two phones and an iPad to a single purchased WiFi. It takes a while to connect, and runs a little on the slow side, but it was usable, and good for the price.2. This device does not have a built-in battery. If you want to carry it around the ship, you will need to plug it into a battery pack or some such. You will also need to keep an eye on cables, because it seems to come unplugged very easily or to at least lose the WiFi it is repeating. (The good news is that I could fit the modem and battery in a waterproof bag.)3. The device allows use of two common VPN protocols (OpenVPN, WireGuard), but our cruise ship disconnected us when I tried to install WireGuard. I have no idea how it knew, so this may be user error. But if you are planning to use this with a VPN, then I would suggest you install and test it before you travel.4. You have to be careful about the login and logoff, because our phones seemed to be identifying to the router using the same codes that the router was using to link to the ship's WiFi. So if the router turns off, then the ship might think that line is still connected, and not let anyone else connect on that account. This seems like pretty common behavior when a router is used as a repeater, so plan accordingly.5. We did not use the Mango for USB modem, tethering, or ethernet. I have no reason to believe these don't work, it was just not what we were looking for.6. This was almost a five-star review, but it was not as easy to set up as I had wanted. If you wait to get to the cruise ship before you try to set it up, you might spend a few hours of your cruise trying to figure out the instructions. This was only slightly harder than a regular modem repeater, but I had been trying to do the set-up on the flaky ship's Wifi, it would have been much harder.