GL.iNet - GL-A1300 Slate Plus

Agree 1000%. I use the same router to work in my van outside of work. Was a game changer in getting legit speeds but also maintaining a stable connection. I also have dropped it like 300 times and it still is humming along. Worth every penny.

No love for the A1300 (Slate Plus) 😢 I get why no love for Slate AX & 7 for vanilla OpenWRT, but the IPQ40xx is well supported and I’d take it over the MT1300 anyday. Only change I’d make to your list as I’ve got an A1300 & TR3000 myself.

I run a SFF PC and a Mac Studio in my van so getting Wifi is extremely important to me. This is the **GL.iNet GL-A1300 (Slate Plus) travel router**, it was the only small USB powered and energy efficient dual band router as i want to capture faster speeds on the 5Ghz band instead of being relegated to 2.4Ghz while it has better occlusion penetration its terrible when you are inside a metal box (van). So i ordered the **2x Panel Mount SMA Female To uFL/u.FL/IPX/IPEX Cable Connector** on Ebay for 4.50 USD. Pulled the router apart and attached the two new SMA connectors. This allows me to run coax cable to monster dual band antenna on the roof of the van. I connect to the router with my PC, phone, Mac etc and login into the settings and search for nearby wifi i want to grab. I then connect to it and rebroadcast a new wifi inside my van or use ethernet to feed the internet to my device. Im pulling huge speeds and distances using this setup. You could use this if you had the wifi password to a friends home, workplace, cafe, public network and parked nearby. Its completely stealth as you can hide the rebroadcasted wifi in the van and obviously password protect it or switch it off and run an ethernet cable. Total cost about 200 USD but honestly i would pay 5x that to have these internet speeds in my van. Hope this sparks an idea because i know internet is a sore spot for a lot of us.

Nice! I’m surprised more people don’t realise how ridiculously good this kind of setup is.

I’m currently using a Glinet Slate Plus during my vacation, which is more than sufficient for our specific use case. I’m utilizing the built-in Tailscale client to access ad-free DNS provided by my own home network.

I have found zero drawbacks to using my Slate as a travel router. I bought it for exactly that purpose. I almost bought another one to replace the Flint I had to repurpose elsewhere. The Slate is awesome for connecting to hotel captive portals, or using my phone connection (tethered with USB, it charges the phone too!). What I've most recently is use it to provide connectivity to my spouse's festival booth. Open wifi signal showing 1 bar that would never actually give me an IP on my phone, and the Slate grabbed it, and gave me a steady/fast signal that covered me all the way across the festival grounds to the food trucks. I've got a 5K battery that will keep it powered for an hour or so, but that was just to see 'how long'. For a real job like that, I'd bring my EcoFlow (because the register and everything else would need power too).

Yes to both. [One of these](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NR1SPBV). Slate's power port is USB-C. My only disappointment with this is that the battery doesn't work like a UPS. If using it connected to the mains, and the power drops, the battery is not engaged quickly enough to keep anything connected to it from losing power. The Slate is rated to draw 5V at 4A. At "full bore", this would take around 75min in ideal conditions to use up 5000 mAh. Consider that 5000 milliamps is 5 amps.

This is day 1 buy for me. Price is fantastic too. If you’ve never used a travel router it makes a huge difference in staying connected and the overall experience is super nice.

So I use my GLI version and think of the times when you travel and the WiFi is just terrible in the hotel. This is often because of poorly placed APs or simply not enough of them installed. The simplest thing it will do is pickup the hotel WiFi signal, and then rebroadcast that signal in your room. I think of it as a much larger more powerful WiFi antenna for my phone, laptop etc. It’s even better if the room has an Ethernet port available at a desk or wall, now it’s not rebroadcasting a signal it’s directly connected to the network and you have your own small AP just for your room. It will also work with cellular networks etc. If you travel and consistently find that the WiFi is bad, this kind of product makes things much better.

As someone who just got done traveling to multiple places and staying for a week at those places, trying out a couple different travel routers at each place (GL iNet & Asus Go), I like the Asus the best. I love the form factor of the GL iNet, but after 6 hours or so it disconnected. I had to unplug it and plug it back in. Google mentioned something about the WAN settings (I’d have to find it). Whereas the Asus just worked. It never disconnected, worked fine in WISP mode and just regular eithernet. So now my go to is the Asus Go for my travel router.

I've been quite impressed with this tiny little GLNet travel router. I use it when I'm out with the RV and starlink. It runs wrt software that is really configurable. Captive portal was easy on it too. I run an opnsense firewall at home but that little router is great too.

well you need to touch their modem, thats how the internet connection gets into the property. if they have a seaprate modem and router then you can unplug their router and plug in yours, I personally like the GL-iNet traver routers, but any router would do in this case. however if they have a combo router-modem then your gonna need to plug your router into theirs anyway to get internet, and while you could setup a VPN on the GL.Inet that sends all your trafic though it, but at that point you might aswell save yourself the money on the router and just run the VPN directly on your devices.

GL.Inet 100% as it runs relativley pure OpenWRT and has a bunch of nice features that while you might not use them this time are great for other times, like you can connect it to public wifi and then your devices to it to isolate them, and as mentioned above setup a VPN service on it to send all your traffic though the VPN. i'm pretty sure TP link dosnt have these features or if it does they are way more basic. I deff know it dosnt let you connect to public Wifi's and use that as a wan connection cuz iv had to reaseach it recently due to moving to an appartment with shared wifi.

I love their products, I have one of their travel routers and it’s extremely handy.