Wireless Travel Router
Pocket size router, bridge, and USB wireless client
This tiny, ludicrously cheap router (smaller than the admirably small Apple Airport Express, and actually smaller than the power supply of my MacBook Air) is a wireless Swiss Army Knife: it can be router, bridge, or USB wireless client. That means it can be used to create an instant network, if you have access to a wired one, or to connect a machine without internal wireless networking to an existing wireless network, or to extend an existing wireless net, and in a few other ways as well. There are larger routers in the same TP-Link family, with more RAM and greater flexibility (you can swap out the firmware, for instance, to turn some of them into Tor routers), but they’re not watch-pocket size.
This “Nano” version is powered via Micro-USB port, too, which is clever — odds are good that power can be found, since so many devices require Micro-USB, and that means forgetting the included power supply is probably not a crisis.
Last week, couchsurfing with a friend who’d just moved into a new apartment, this router proved a lifesaver: I needed to get through to a work website, and his regular router which had been set up for a different ISP wasn’t behaving as expected with his freshly activated Verizon internet service. I had brought along the TP-Link with the thought that it might prove useful at a conference I was attending. Turns out, I hadn’t had a chance to use it until the router SNAFU made me remember it. “Look what I happen to have along — let’s check it out.”
Just plugging it it, it turns out, wasn’t *quite* good enough: the default was not plug-and-play “wireless router” as I’d expected. However, the fold-out directions — not quite Apple good, but not bad — explained how to switch modes through the built-in browser-based GUI. That done, we switched the default admin password (“admin / admin” is nicely guessable, and thus a bad choice), created a nicer wireless-access password than the long, random one provided, and voila! — Crisis averted.
One way I’m using it now is to provide a guest network in my house, which I can play with or reconfigure without touching the regular access point. If I want to remove guest access, to tighten up that access, or for that matter to throw it wide open, this is a nice granular way to do that. It’s also just nice to have a spare router around, since I find their lifespans are unpredictable.
09/14/15TP-LINK TL-WR702N Wireless N150 Travel Router $20
