GL-MT1300

I recently purchased two travel routers and decided to review them. When I first received them, they were dropping connection about every hour, but a firmware update resolved that. I tested one in my home lab for two weeks with a G6 Instant connected, and it worked flawlessly. Since it was on my home WiFi, no external connections were really involved. I then took it on a trip to Canada as a real-world test. On past trips I’ve used GL.iNet travel routers, which have some issues but are generally reliable. My first stop was a Marriott hotel. Setup was easy, and the captive portal popped up quickly — a big improvement over the GL.iNet, which struggled in that area. The cameras worked well. However, I noticed significant issues with WiFi calling and real-time communication. A Teams call for work was choppy, and Discord and WiFi calls had similar problems. I tested multiple devices and both UTRs with the same results. The router also required frequent power cycles because it would stop passing traffic while still showing as connected. When I connected directly to the hotel’s WiFi, these issues didn’t occur, though it could have been hotel-related. In Toronto, my Airbnb had gigabit internet, and I was able to connect via Ethernet, getting full symmetrical speeds directly to my computer. For context, my home setup is 10 Gbps symmetrical, so I don’t have bandwidth limitations there. Through the travel router over Ethernet using Teleport VPN to my gateway, I saw around 200 Mbps, which is respectable. That said, I value stability over raw speed. Support from Ubiquiti wasn’t very helpful, which was disappointing. Still, this is their first release, and I’m sure improvements will come. For now, I’ll be sticking with GL.iNet. That is just my experience using the UTR. I am hopeful it will improve with future updates. P.S Sorry for the terrible photo, but it did work out quite well with the outlet right next to the ethernet. https://preview.redd.it/mfoupeu305fg1.jpg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a33a367a7a0590afadae74d14c1f33dbe715de4c

So I was able to pick up a UTR just in time for our family trip to Hawaii but didn't have anytime to setup or test before we left. I've seen a few post asking about the use case for this and why you might grab one vs a GL.iNet and I thought I'd share why this is working great for me so far. We have a 10 month old and use a G4 Instant as her crib cam so the Teleport feature immediately caught my eye and made it worth it to try it out. The fact that we could be on vacation and have a baby monitor that was tied back to our home network and NVR and we could view it along with all our other security cameras with almost no set up is exactly what I've been looking for. Aside from the Unifi Protect capabilities, I was interested to see how the UTR works with our other devices. We had decided to bring a few different smart home devices with us since it was going to be a longer trip and we weren't sure about the weather. A couple Google Nest Mini's to act as a speaker group across the condo, a Fire stick with all our streaming apps already signed in, plus our laptops, iPads, and phones for all 4 adults. The fact that we would be able to pull out any of these devices and have them just connect was partially the reason we even decided to bring some of them. Logging in to hotel wifi with captive portals is such a pain with multiple devices, even if it is free, and trying to do that on a smart speaker or streaming stick and you're SOL. Plus the added benefit of our Fire TV going through our home network gave us the ability to watch live TV from our local channels mostly to keep up with the news) and we don't run the risk of all our streaming apps thinking we're sharing passwords and logging us out at home. I'm sure y'all have already guessed where this might not work great. The UTR with its wifi5 and shit range isn't going to handle all these devices very well and that's true. Everything connected just fine but started to run into signal strength and speed issues pretty quickly. So that's where I decided to experiment a little. I brought along an extra U6Lite to act as a dedicated AP so I could get some better range and add wifi6 into the mix. It took a bit of figuring out; I had to reset the U6Lite and set it up in standalone mode, use the same SSID/Password as my home network, and change the SSID on the UTR to something/anything else (there needs to be a way to disable wifi) but once I was done everything connected perfectly. I had faster speeds and signal that extended about 30ft out onto the lawn outside the condo. I'm definitely a novice when it comes to networking and the home lab so maybe all this could have been done with any other travel router with a VPN, but for $79 for someone who already has a Unifi setup at home, this was absolutely perfect. Now hopefully the weather stays nice and we don't spend anytime inside and all this was for nothing but at least it was fun and I get to tell my wife it worked. TL;DR : UTR with U6Lite as AP on hotel gigibit works great for 10+ devices, including 4k steaming stick and smart speaker groups, plus G4 Instant as baby monitor while grandma watches the little one for date night, all with very little setup.

Edit: note I’m referring to a dedicated mobile hotspot not just hot spotting your phone. Serious question here. Other than VPN is there a reason a travel router such as GL-inet or UTR vs a mobile hotspot is valuable? I see arguments to using a travel router as: \-Set up all devices in a family to connect to it so when you arrive they all just join. Mobile hotspot does this. \-Not being on hotel, Starbucks, etc WiFi exposed. Your hotspot is isolated. \-VPN back to your home network. Ok the router doing the lifting here makes sense. But you could just use VPN per device (most not all devices so I get the travel router excels here) as needed while on the hotspot to accomplish this. For my experience, with slower upload speeds on my home network (thanks a lot, Comcast) back to my remote location were pretty crippling so I would only run VPN when absolutely necessary. \-Travel router can help in situations where you’re say on a cruise ship so mobile hotspot wouldn’t work anyways. \-Travel router doesn’t require monthly internet expenses. Although I see lots of people wanting a 5G SIM card included in UTR so this may be a wash. So what else am I missing? I’m fortunate enough my company pays for a mobile hotspot for me for work travel, and I take it with me camping, etc., as it cost the company the same each month with an unlimited data plan regardless if I use it or not. I also bought a GL-inet Slate to play with mostly and better understand these devices but again, I find myself more often than not just using my mobile hotspot versus setting up the travel router. For all the reasons listed above. I really want to get a UTR because I like the concept but I really question if I would actually use it / trying to justify it.

You could get the Gl.inet and not have lug around a U6Lite and it also comes with wifi 7. You said it yourself the only config change required was to have the same wifi settings as you have them at home and all devices will auto-connect.

Piece by piece getting away from my Ring system at home and moving over to hardwired POE cameras with Protect, so far very impressed. Also picked up a G6 instant to play with. Brought it along on a beach trip and finally got everything working. I already had a Glinet Slate 7 travel router. Had that connect back to my UCG Fiber with its wireguard client (took some trial and error as I also had Tailscale going on the travel router that I think was causing some issues) and then able to have the G6 instant connect to my travel WiFi here and sending back to my home protect UNVR. Initially adopted the G6 instant at home on my home WiFi network that the UNVR is on. Have a wireguard VPN server setup on the UCG Fiber and wireguard client on the Slate 7. Had to make some IP changes so that none of these various private subnets overlapped which caused issues at first given I also have a portable starlink with its own private IP subnet i would also connect to. BUT, once all these various private networks each had their own unique non-overlapping IP subnets it was fine. Slate 7 connects to whatever internet service I have while traveling (cell tethering, another WiFi network, or starlink mini) and the G6 instant the connects to my travel WiFi network. Fire it up and in protect app just have to “re-adopt” the G6 instant with the new WiFi credentials The travel WiFi SSID does NOT need to be the same as your home WiFi SSID, the camera just needs to be able to connect to your home NVR locally through the VPN, as long as that can happen then it should be fine. Took some trial and error but once travel router was connected and the VPN was connected as long as I could log in to my NVR with my laptop the local IP through the VPN then camera could as well. Just have it running over a portable 100wh battery pack which could power it for about 24 hours.