The best wireless travel routers avoid these hassles by letting you set up your own private bubble of Wi-Fi anywhere you happen to land, whether that’s in a conference centre, hotel room, or airport lounge. For most people, you should just buy the TP-Link TL-WR902AC - it’s small enough to chuck in a backpack, and can even double as a Wi-Fi range extender. If you also want a cellular connection as backup, the Netgear Nighthawk M1 is for you, as it doubles as a mobile hotspot for your hotel room or car. For such a small device, the TL-WR902AC offers impressive dual-band Wi-Fi performance. It’s also really versatile, since it can be not only be used as a router or access point to create a wireless network, but also as a range extender, private Wi-FI hotspot or even as a bridge to connect a wired device to a Wi-Fi network by using its built-in Ethernet port in the opposite direction. A built-in USB port lets you share files and media from a removable USB storage device, and it can also provide up to 2A of passthrough power to charge your smartphone or tablet. The only real downside is that the port layout can be a bit awkward, since the USB and microUSB power ports are on the opposite side from the Ethernet port. Wireless Spec: 802.11ac | Security: WPA2 | Standard/Speed: AC750 | Bands: Dual-band | MU-MIMO: No | Beamforming: No | Wired Ports: 1 With support for up to 20 simultaneous devices, Netgear’s Nighthawk MR1100 can easily handle your whole family or project team, and unlike most travel routers on this list, the one works as a 4G LTE mobile hotspot too. This means you’ll be able to connect to its Wi-Fi network and get online even when there’s no other Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection around. It’s also the first mobile hotspot to support Gigabit LTE, with 4X4 MIMO and four-band Carrier Aggregation, so it’s capable of providing internet speeds that can rival your home broadband connection. It’s not just about LTE, though—the MR1100 works as a traditional portable router too. Just plug a normal internet connection into the Ethernet port, and you can share access from it to your Wi-Fi devices. A large 2.4-inch colour LCD screen also ensures that you can keep track of the router’s status and how much data you’re using. The rechargeable battery can keep you going for up to 24 hours before you need to charge it, and in a pinch you can also use some of that capacity to charge your smartphone or other mobile devices. Wireless Spec: 802.11ac / 4G LTE | Security: WPA2 | Standard/Speed: AC750 | Bands: Dual-band | MU-MIMO: No | Beamforming: No | Wired Ports: 1 Like most travel routers, the TL-WR802N is designed for use by one or two users when you’re on the go, and the 300Mbps 802.11n speeds will likely be faster than the internet connection at most hotels and conference centers you find yourself in. This little pocket-sized router offers exceptional coverage, so you won’t need to worry about staying connected while you’re roaming around the boardroom. The N300 draws its power via a micro USB port that can connect directly to a wall charger or even a laptop, so you won’t have to worry about how to power it, and it can also function as a repeater, Wi-Fi client, or even an extender for a public WISP hotspot. The only downside is that, unlike its dual-band sibling, the TL-WR902AC, it lacks a USB port, so you won’t be able to use it for sharing files. Wireless Spec: 802.11n | Security: WPA2 | Standard/Speed: N300 | Bands: Single-band | MU-MIMO: No | Beamforming: No | Wired Ports: 1 Advanced users will appreciate how much more this one offers, however, since it uses the versatile OpenWrt firmware, with both OpenVPN and WireGuard pre-installed. This means it’s ready to go as a VPN gateway to protect your online privacy—something that’s essential when you’re surfing from insecure hotel rooms and airport lounges. It even has 25 VPN popular service providers pre-configured, plus it automatically uses Cloudflare’s encrypted DNS servers for additional security, whether you’re using a VPN service or not. As if the three Ethernet ports weren’t enough, there’s also a built-in USB 2.0 port and a microSD card slot for connecting external storage devices or adding up to 128GB of storage directly to the router to use it as a portable file server. Wireless Spec: 802.11ac | Security: WPA2 | Standard/Speed: AC750 | Bands: Dual-band | MU-MIMO: No | Beamforming: No | Wired Ports: 3 With WireGuard encryption, support for multiple open source VPN protocols, and even Tor anonymous network routing, this router ensures that you can always have a secure and private connection to the internet if you’re a relatively advanced user. Whether that’s over your hotel’s shared network or your carrier’s LTE network, all of your traffic will be encrypted, and you can even have an always-on tunnel back into your home or office network. It’s not just for mobile LTE access, however; it’s also a capable Wi-Fi access point, with dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz support with 733Mbps throughput across both bands, along with a built-in battery that offers up to eight hours of use and a USB port and microSD card slots that can be used for sharing files with your connected devices. Since it’s designed to be used from anywhere, it also features a built-in rechargeable battery that promises up to eight hours of use on a single charge. Wireless Spec: 802.11ac / 4G LTE | Security: WPA2 | Standard/Speed: AC750 | Bands: Dual-band | MU-MIMO: No | Beamforming: No | Wired Ports: 1 Wireless Spec: 802.11n | Security: WPA2 | Standard/Speed: N150 | Bands: Single-band | MU-MIMO: No | Beamforming: No | Wired Ports: 1 This has given rise to a whole new category of travel routers: devices that are specifically designed to be extremely portable—often small enough to be carried in a pocket—and run from internal batteries or a simple USB-powered connection that lets you plug them into a laptop or portable battery pack to create your own personal Wi-Fi network. Most importantly, since public Wi-Fi hotspots are usually insecure, a good travel router can also offer additional peace of mind by offering a private, encrypted Wi-Fi network for your traffic, securing the connections not only between your devices and the router, but making sure that the traffic leaving the router is also encrypted. This means that you can take them just about anywhere you happen to land, whether it’s between your home and the office, to a coffee shop where you might want to have more secure Wi-Fi, or on the road with you to use in hotels, conference centers, and airport lounges.
Bandwidth and Performance
When shopping for a primary router for your home, you’re looking for things like enough range to blanket your home with the kind of strong Wi-Fi signal you need to support streaming and gaming from multiple devices. This is not the case with travel routers. In fact, you may find that even a basic router—that’s one that offers 802.11n support at 150Mbps speeds—is more than enough.
Wireless Frequencies: Single-Band vs. Dual-Band
Like other wireless routers, travel routers come in single or multi-band versions, which basically refers to the frequencies they use. A single-band router works only on the 2.4GHz frequency, while a dual-band router offers both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies on two separate bands.
Security and Privacy
As a bare minimum, every modern wireless travel router should include support for the Wireless Protected Access 2 (WPA2) encryption standard. This is even more important in a travel router that you’ll be using in more public spaces. While this probably isn’t such a big deal if all you want to do is stream movies from Netflix, if confidentiality is important, we strongly recommend using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) when connecting through a travel router, and while you can do this directly from your devices, you’ll probably find it even simpler to pick up a travel router with built-in VPN support, so that your connection is automatically encrypted as soon as you plug it in.
Connectivity
Almost all travel routers offer the same type of connectivity that your home router does—turning a wired connection into a Wi-Fi network. However, as more hotels move toward offering guest Wi-Fi networks instead of Ethernet jacks, you’ll probably find it more useful to get a travel router that can connect to a public Wi-Fi network as well. There’s also a category of travel routers that can act as mobile hotspots to offer internet access for your mobile devices over an LTE cellular network.
About Our Trusted Experts
Jesse Hollington is a freelance writer with over 10 years of experience writing about technology and three decades of experience in information technology and networking. He’s installed, tested, and configured just about every type and brand of router, firewall, wireless access point, and network extender in places ranging from single-family dwellings to office buildings. Katie Dundas is a writer and journalist with a passion for technology. She has written for Business Insider, Travel Trend, Matador Network, and Much Better Adventures. Katie specializes in travel technology. Andy Zahn has been writing for Lifewire since April 2019. When he’s not obsessing over (and writing about) the latest gadgets and consumer technology, he can be found traveling and photographing the wild Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, or tending to a herd of obnoxious goats on a small farm in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens.
