Unifi Travel Router

https://blog.ui.com/article/travel-in-style-unifi-style-unifi-travel-router

66•flurdy•2h ago

Comments

wateralien•1h ago

I never travel without my GL-AXT1800. Saved me so many times: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/ I’m actually on it right now.

kstrauser•1h ago

Heartily seconded! A friend recommended I get one and now I push all my other technical friends to buy one, too.

My wife and I traveled a bit this year and it was great having all our gadgets connecting to a single AP under our control. It’s easily paid for itself by avoiding ludicrous per-device daily charges.

windexh8er•36m ago

I think most travel APs can generally do this, but the feature that makes GL.iNet products popular is: extensibility. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers, but making products useful via extensibility is a sure fire way to open your target market directly up to prosumers. And those are the buyers that will find you.

I own two of their products, one of them I bought in 2019 and can still run what I need to on it.

theoreticalmal•1h ago

What is the benefit of this over, for example, an iPhone hotspot?

WillPostForFood•50m ago

An iPhone can't bridge a wifi network. So you need something like a travel router to share a wifi connection.

trelane•38m ago

You can control it from the ground up, including installing alternate firmware. You can also use VPNs etc.

neither_color•36m ago

Run one wireguard server in your home and one client instance on this router and now all of your devices can share the same residential VPN connection. No fraud blocks or extra verifications from your banking apps, no million suspicious login detected from all your social accounts, use your home netflix account, etc. All without your individual devices running a VPN app.

drnick1•2m ago

> Run one wireguard server in your home and one client instance on this router and now all of your devices can share the same residential VPN connection.

You don't need a "travel router" for this. My phone is permanently connected to my server via Wireguard (so that I can access my files from anywhere). Adding another device just requires adding a peer in the server's config file and can be accomplished very quickly. It's not clear what problem the travel router solves, unless perhaps you travel with dozens of devices.

> no million suspicious login detected from all your social accounts,

I can personally do without those.

kleinsch•19m ago

Huge plus one. Useful to bridge hotel wifi so all my devices connect automatically, also useful as an ad-hoc router that fits into my travel pack.

hnburnsy•2m ago

Have you tried hooking it up to an Ethernet port in a hotel room like the one that the TV uses?

cromka•1h ago

This is brilliant, actually very innovative product by Unifi. It's interesting because it seems they do what Apple does: they can add new products and features only because all the devices work together in an ecosystem.

libeclipse•1h ago

Innovative how? Many travel routers already exist and support similar features

cromka•1h ago

The way it automatically connects to your home and presents to your devices as part of your home WiFi. So you bring that device with you and everything else works like you're back home.

I use OPNSense and OpenWRT myself and there's no way you can make travel routers this convenient with them.

walterbell•1h ago

> presents to your devices as part of your home WiFi

That will be fun for browser geolocation based on WiFi name.

shermantanktop•54m ago

In a 1 bit environment (==single SSID visible), sure. But most of the time multiple SSIDs are visible, and correlate to each, making detection of abnormalities easier. And the lat/long is also visible to help disambiguate.

walterbell•33m ago

Would both the stationary and mobile instances of that SSID be visible on public databases like https://wigle.net?

cycomanic•32m ago

Why do you think this would be difficult to do using openwrt? Wouldn't you just set up the travel router to have the same ssid and password as your home network and configure a wireguard tunnel from the travel router to your home network (that is if you want to be in your home network)

8fingerlouie•1h ago

They were founded by ex Apple employees, so there's that.

makestuff•1h ago

It seems like the main feature is being able to access your home network to watch netflix, access LAN devices, etc.

How is this different compared to running a tailscale exit node in your home network?

Is the benefit of this that you have a hardware device that you can connect to instead of needing software like tailscale?

lucb1e•1h ago

How would Tailscale run in your home network without a hardware device to connect to?

elteto•1h ago

Not to take away from this device, I think it’s pretty neat. But you can run tailscale on anything, even Apple TVs. If you have a Unifi network odds are that you have at least one spare computing device that can run tailscale.

atonse•5m ago

Problem is that I think my Apple TV goes into some sort of deep idle mode where tailscale stops working. So it’s been effectively useless for me when I travel.

AJRF•1h ago

You can create a subnet router on tailscale and access any device on your local network, regardless of them having tailscale installed

__float•1h ago

I think so: it looks like "UniFi Teleport" is also based on Wireguard.

You can also do this with a travel router like one of GL.iNet's and Tailscale subnet routers.

slig•1h ago

I have a hard time believing anyone would actually use this versus self-hosting headscale in a discarded ThinkCentre and running it from a closet.

nickt•1h ago

Not sure if you’re serious but reeks of “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially”

slig•37m ago

Not serious, and you got it.

olalonde•28m ago

Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

dangus•52m ago

I run OpnSense, Wireguard, hooked up to third party WiFi access points, and I had to do a lot of configuration and work that I wouldn't have had to do if I had just bought Ubiquiti equipment.

I did save money, a really significant amount of money.

Obviously, yes, I am capable of going through the work that eliminates my need for this product. I have no trouble configuring Wireguard and setting it up on my client devices and running through all that.

But it was a lot of work to get to this point and I had to spend a lot of time learning how to do that, even as a person who is already technical. Wireguard in particular took me a solid half a day to build understanding and get it configured.

If I was a little bit richer and I went back in time I'd probably just buy all Unifi. In fact if I wet back in time I think I'd just buy Unifi.

This specific device does seem like a really nice extension of their product line.

tonypapousek•21m ago

I’m in the market for a solid travel router, and my home network is all Unifi gear. This is a no brainer, especially with the built-in Teleport support.

syntaxing•1h ago

I really like “bring your home everywhere aspect”. I can be a pain connecting my whole family devices to another SSID. If it can do WiFi repeating (as in login to a single hotel account and stream to rest of device), I would absolutely get one. If not, GL inet is still the way to go

notyourwork•58m ago

Can GL inet not do that? Genuinely asking.

tguvot•55m ago

can do it

teeray•42m ago

Can confirm. It also has a mode to jump through the captive portal. I just set it up with the same SSID and PSK as my home wifi and everything we bring connects automatically. It also routes everything through Tailscale.

pyrolistical•41m ago

? You just need to set it up once and devices will auto reconnect by default

saagarjha•1h ago

Available December 29th: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/utr

nerdix•43m ago

Wifi 5 for an $80 router in 2026 (I mean we're almost there) is pretty disappointing. I get that its mostly going to be used on crappy hotel networks and the crappy hotel network will often be the bottleneck but $80 looks to be roughly twice the price of the typical travel wifi 5 travel router, about equal to the price of a typical wifi 6 travel router, and only $30-40 cheaper than a typical wifi 7 travel router.

I don't mind a unifi premium for the integration but they should at least have a $50 wifi 5 version and a $100 wifi 6 "pro" version

novok•19m ago

I'd pay $30 for the software alone that actually works.

IncreasePosts•2m ago

Based on unifis release schedule that means may 2026

allovertheworld•59m ago

whats the point of this? I got wireguard on my phone connected to my home network (also unifi).

If this device had a 5g sim slot, then I could see the point but it’s not that.

WillPostForFood•43m ago

The main benefit of a travel router is creating a private network, and sharing a wifi connection. An iPhone can't do that, though Android phones can.

hnburnsy•27m ago

Some third party WiFis limit the number of devices. This gets around that limit.

cyberrock•46m ago

I wish one of these devices would have an internal battery again like the old HooToo Tripmates. Using it with a power bank doesn't feel quite the same.

aspenmayer•20m ago

GL-iNet’s Mudi product line has an internal battery and eSIM and physical SIM card support.

Mudi V2: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-e750/

They have an upcoming 5G NR WiFi 7 version:

Mudi 7: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-e5800/

tonymet•39m ago

I clone my home WiFi SSID with my travel router so when we arrive at the hotel all of our devices auto connect without having to configure the consent / captive WiFi screen.

It’s also nice to control VPN and DNS from one place , in case the hotel is doing DNS or IP filtering.

And quite a few hotels still offer wired Ethernet , which helps performance.

GlenTheMachine•30m ago

I travel internationally all the time. Someone tell me why I need this.

novok•17m ago

You have a workplace that insists you are working from your home while you travel.

It has limits, like the amazon hardware keypress thingy with north korea showed recently, but unless your working at superbigtech or defense contractor it would probably work.

aghilmort•3m ago

connect screenless devices, e.g., Echo Dot extend weak wireless range in hotel screen share or network between multiple devices eg travel with two laptops and can virtual KVM only have to do the captive device on one - many hotels limit number of devices extra security buffer phone can't bridge wifi for headless like this etc etc

qgin•26m ago

> Automatic handling of captive portal authentication

Very curious about how they're pulling this off

varenc•11m ago

Details are scarce right now, but they say that via the UniFi mobile you'll authenticate yourself onto the captive portal and the travel router will use that. Guessing it'll clone your phone's MAC?

bnc319•6m ago

So… hear me out. Could I connect this to an airline’s paid in-flight WiFi network, and then broadcast an open network to effectively open up access to all other passengers for free? If enough WiFi pirates do this on flights perhaps it would kill paid WiFi entirely (just need enough Good Samaritans)

(And yes I know there are other bypasses you can do like spoofing MAC addresses to get around some device count restrictions)

IncreasePosts•4m ago

Maybe. And then get throttled or banned for using too much bandwidth. You don't need this product to do this though, you can do the same thing with a laptop and your phone

baggy_trough•1m ago

I need something like this to share a single wifi connection among devices on a cruise. I don't care about the home network access though. Any recommendations?

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