There are many reasons to use a travel router when on the go. For example, protecting yourself from malicious actors on hotel wifi. As I write this, I am in an extended stay at a foreign hotel. The hotel TV has built in YouTube and streaming, and on three occasions so far, the TV has been taken over by people in other rooms apparently by accident.

At minimum, a travel router isolates your devices from the other people on the hotel wifi. p But it can do so much more. It can allow you to add a streaming device to the TV, as many cannot navigate the captive portal. Many can support a connected USB drive to act as a simple media server to stream to the device you connect to your TV.

Finally, your device can act as a VPN gateway for your devices, soomething I am doing with my travel router as we speak. Every web request is running through my VPN server in my apartment. My current preference has been the GL.iNet line of travel routers. They run a variant of an open firmware and have general been reliable. I have had several.

My current one for this trip is the A1300, aka the Slate Plus, released in 2022.  But I have been finding it was time to try to improve throughput of my VPN. So, I looked at what was available.

A year younger is the slightly faster Beryl AX, the MT-1300. The Slate Plus has two WAN and one LAN port, the Beryl AX has one LAN port.

There are two newer versions in the Slate line, the Slate AX and the Slate 7. The company is also prepping a new addition to the Beryl line. The Slate 7 offers a LCD control screen, which is a useful feature, but not necessarily worth the premium. The Slate series also has a reputation for running a bit hotter.

So, even though the Beryl AX is two years old now, and newer devices exist, it is a more mature reliable choice. Even spending an extended time traveling, do you need faster wifi, or 2.5gb networking? Neither of which most hotels have. What you need is speed and reliability, and the ability to add additional security measures.