I hear about people using travel routers to connect devices to hotel wifi or in dorm rooms. What is a travel router and what does it do differently than just connecting to the provided wifi? TIA!
In: Technology
As someone that has used these here are the scenarios for where I bring my own router and its configuration:
Configuration:
* The Router can connect to an available WiFi network or connect to a wired network.
* It then makes a VPN connection back to my office
* It then provides its own private “to me” wifi network and/or wired network where the network is secured through the VPN.
The use cases:
* Restrictive network access in the hotel.
This is worst in Vegas, probably bad in San Francisco/New York/Seattle
Particularly during conferences, hotels will have “Free wifi”. that “Free” is with the compulsory “amenity charge” that grants you access to a fitness facility, business office, and room wifi. However, it is very often limited to 2 devices/room. If you are going to Vegas to gamble, well, fine, that probably works. But going to a technology conference? We will have 3 people in the room, each will have a minimum of 3 devices (phone, computer, tablets, whatever we are evaluating from the show, or working on for our demonstrations, or maybe some analytics devices for determining show success, etc.) Anyhow, we can expect to need 12 devices/room to be operating. At $15/day/device for a typical “amenity” change, that’s a lot of cell phones going to the gym that can be avoided by using a single “travel router” connection, now our room can tunnel all that data securely out.
* Travel to locations where your data can be expected to be scraped, spied upon, or filtered/censored
From the above, this should be obvious. But maybe you aren’t thinking about it when you go into that meeting room in a customer or supplier’s building. They have the whiteboard setup, or the first slide of the powerpoint is the WiFi network access information. You have been traveling for 20 hours and want to get a quick message back to the kids so you connect and do that facetime meeting or whatevs. Then halfway through the meeting, you check your email…
If instead you just connect your travel router to this network you can be sure your communications are a bit more secured.
Latest Answers