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The Opal is way more capable than the UTR. The UTR’s max transmission power is just 13dBm. An iPhone 17 hotspot (25dBm) is literally 10X more powerful than the UTR, and the GL.iNet Opal is 14X more powerful (30dBm). And that’s before external antenna gain which will benefit the Opal. Even the tiny GL.iNet Mango has a tx power of 20dBm.
GL.inet still has the best on price: the mango can be had on sale for 20 USD regularly. I have one installed at a bunch of family member’s houses to VPN 24/7 through to my house. I’ve had none of them fail although one does need a reboot every few months.
Yes new version same size: feature: USB-C, Gigabit LAN, DUAL Band WiFi AC/AX - BE is probably to much for the size. Mango is still a great device (Size and prize), and with full OpenWRT support supported for many years to come. But of course: WiFi Repeater mode is really slow -> 150 MBit (20 MHz) is slowed down to 75 MBit (theoretical maximum). But this is still enough for most hotels. But size and power consumption (<1W) is still a dream. And it's running perfectly with OpenWRT 25.12 RC4.
Gl.Inet Mango is single 2.4 ghz AP 2 Stream N. Small extreme low Energy and OpenWRT supported. For your use case you don’t need even AC.
I have been happy with the Beryl AX connecting back to my FireWalla Gold, using FireWalla’s built-in WreGuard. I used the Mango for awhile and upgraded to the AX and love it. It worked at four airports and several hotels that we visited. My son used it on a cruise and it worked. I probably will give my son the Mango. Edit: I can also connect to my Firewalla with the AX and the Mango using OpenVN. Mango is cheaply built, but does the job for $25. AX is better built. Both use the same web-based OS to manage.
I want to second the Gli series I have the Beryl at home behind my router in modem mode,ive.actually turned of wireless and let my mesh handle thst in AP mode but there's so much to play with. Also have a gli melon at my MIL's for Netflix :)
Very bad performance though.
> I have one of their travel routers and it is bar-none the best bang for your buck of any router I've ever owned when it comes to features and usability. I was very pleasenetly supprised with the feature set of the GLI mini travel router when I got mine. Game changer on vacations. Connect to hotel Wifi once, family devices auto connect to the GLI, Split VPN tunnels puts their traffic through PIA and mine through the homelab Wiregaurd. No more device limits, captive portals, or crapy hotel TV chromecast that never seem to pair.
IMO, the UTR is a closer competition to the Opal, but provides a significantly better experience than that particular router. It's meant to be as small as possible, while providing just enough functionalities that matters to a travel router use case, plus integration with the Unifi ecosystem. GL.iNet's other solutions are more general and allows much more flexibility with their OpenWRT based OS but with that comes a certain degree of complexity (I mean theoretically you can run your whole home network off of a Beryl if you so choose).
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