It seems to perform well in all my tests and has good range, but even after the latest software update of 3.003 It still has the bug of not transmitting on 5 ghz if your input is from 5 ghz. The 2 ghz still works and if you have 2 ghz as the input both bands will transmit. The problem was not fixed with the 3.003 update. No other complaints found yet after having it for only one day.
UPDATE: I just went to the wireless tab and shut the 5 ghz band off and restarted it, and it came up and started working, when I checked on my input I found that it has switched to a 2 ghz input, so it did not really fix anything.
I also noticed that when you are hooked to 5 ghz as an input you use only one channel on the 2 ghz output, but if your using 2 ghz input then the output uses two channels for faster data speed. That makes two bugs that I have found.
Makes it easy to be secure in coffee shops and while traveling. Really does what it claims. It is easy to forget how insecure wifi can be. In fact, many people never change the router password, or update its firmware, let alone use a strong firewall or VPN. With this thing you can have just about the strongest possible security with ease. I built a router at home with a mini PC and OPNsense software. Everything at home is behind a strong firewall, and sent out a VPN. I can also VPN into my home network using two-factor authentication. With this thing, I have something very nearly as good, that automatically protects any wireless device that me or my family uses while traveling. If we have to pay for each connection, we just buy one for this device, and then am use it. We can easily vpn into our home network. That means we can use our home pihole to block all ads in every app and browser. We have web filtering for malicious sites, or child inappropriate sites. Very cool. All my work for that great home setup is now on the road with us.
I recently purchased this router to use at hotels during travel over the holidays. I have an OpenVPN setup running at my home and used this for secure tunneling from the hotel. Unit worked great in this role. The only real issue I ran into is I couldn't get it to page forward from the hotel signup page via bonjour so I could authenticate against the router MAC address. Instead I had to first connect to the hotel signup page, authenticate, then switch back to the router and have the router clone my laptop mac. It worked and was stable after that. It's entirely possible that I missed a setting or something to make this work smoother.
A HUGE advantage to this router is 5G. By having dual-band capability you can connect to the hotel wifi using 2.4Ghz and your devices can connect to this router via 5GHz. Great improvement in speeds doing it this way.
I also tested using it with a battery pack just in case that situation ever came up. I had a 6000MAh pack and it ran it for the better part of a day. Not a bad way to go.
The one thing you have to remember to do is hit the reset button briefly after powering up. It doesn't just come up once you plug it in.
All in all a nice little router for the price.
This thing's freakin AWESOME! Works as advertised and then some, very customizable and secure. I'll say that the new firmware is a little buggy but otherwise everything else is totally solid such as the WiFi connection to the internet source as well as peripherals. The ONLY issue I've had is the physical switch button on the router, it only turned off the VPN and didn't turn it back ON however, I was able to work this issue out in the forums relatively quickly and now the switch works and the bug had been found.
All in all I would recommend this router. It's totally worth getting if you want to be in control of your privacy and security. This thing is only going to get better and better.
This little product is a gem for travelers who need a lot of connectivity options for different devices. If you spend a lot of time in hotels you'll know that not all hotel WiFi are equal. Some hotels will not allow you to use a ChromeCast or AppleTV on their WiFi because it needs to go thru a sign-in page. Some hotels also limit the amount of devices you can connect per account/rooms. You just need to connect your computer via wireless or Ethernet cable to the router and then connect the router to the hotel's WiFi or Ethernet (if available in your room) and then go to the sign-in page to log-in.
If you are going to use the hotel WiFi, you need to connect to the router first, then set it as a repeater and select the WiFi name you want to connect to. Once that's done, maybe your browser will trigger the hotel's log-in page, maybe it won't. No worries if it does not, you can manually trigger it yourself by going to this URL: www.msftconnecttest.com/redirect (save that in your favorites, it will always be useful as you can use it anytime you connect to a WiFi and the log-in webpage doesn't trigger).
It's really that easy. Also, once you've connected to the internet for the first time with the router, go to the Upgrade section and upgrade the device's firmware as to avoid version 3.003 because it had a bug with auto-reconnect to WiFi if it disconnects for some reason.
You don't need advanced knowledge of IT or networking to work the device as it is fairly simple.
I'm enjoying it thoroughly and I'm sure you will too.
Feature Product
- DUAL BAND AC ROUTER: Simultaneous dual band with wireless speed 300Mbps(2.4G)+433Mbps(5G). Convert a public network(wired/wireless) to a private Wi-Fi for secure surfing.
- OPEN SOURCE & PROGRAMMABLE: OpenWrt/LEDE pre-installed, backed by software repository.
- VPN CLIENT & SERVER: OpenVPN and WireGuard® pre-installed, compatible with 25+ VPN service providers.
- LARGER STORAGE & EXTENSIBILITY: 128MB RAM, 16MB NOR Flash and 128MB NAND Flash, up to 128GB MicroSD slot, USB 2.0 port, three Ethernet ports.
- PACKAGE CONTENTS: Slate (GL-AR750S-Ext) router with 1-year limited warranty, power adapter, USB cable, Ethernet cable and user manual. Please update to the latest firmware from the following link before using: https://dl.gl-inet.com/firmware/ar750s/release/
Description
Powered by Qualcomm QCA9563 SoC, 775MHz CPU 300Mbps(2.4G) + 433Mbps(5G) high speed Wi-Fi DDR2 128MB RAM
Support external MicroSD card storage up to 128GB
16MB Nor flash + 128 Nand flash
Small, light, easy to use
LEDE/OpenWRT pre-installed
Pre-installed WireGuard, OpenVPN, Cloudflare DNS over TLS
Please upgrade your firmware first if you find any problems.
I'm really putting this one to the test. I've had some other portable routers and sent most of them back (or they broke before I could). This one lets you use all 3 ports for LAN, which is great for control over two devices with my laptop plugged in. I use them for shows and performances, and I'm also surprised at how low power of a device it actually is. You can run it from almost any USB port. It's about the size of a Raspberry Pi and great for travel programming. I have it with me all of the time now. Plus the firmware is customizable and I'm always using the advanced menu to tweak various features on the router. I HIGHLY, recommend this if you are looking for one.
I bought this to gain some peace of mind while traveling and to distance myself from Comcast / Xfinity's abusive privacy policies. Had it up, running and configured in under 10 minutes. It connects to wireless signals just fine, and WISP mode is the way to go if you're using it at home, as it both extends the range of a wireless signal and creates its own subnet (which is easily secured). In said mode, it broadcasts two unique wireless SSIDs on 5GHZ and 2.4GHZ signals. DNS-over-TLS worked out of the box, and I verified this via tcpdump after logging into the router's OpenWRT cli interface. Indeed, all relevant traffic is encrypted via Cloudflare. Handles me and my roommate's relatively heavy internet use quite well, and port forwarding works perfectly too.
Pretty much everything about this little router is great, save for one glaring issue: IPv6 support is broken. I mean, it's completely unsupported in most environments. This is apparently due to a known bug in the OpenWRT firmware base that the router uses, and is a pretty simple fix. The AR750s would absolutely be a 5 star product if the developers at GL.iNet resolved the IPv6 issue. I hope they do.
This small travel router with a footprint just larger than a credit card is powered via microUSB that draws between 0.4A - 0.6 A so you may not need to use the original 2A brick. I'd test any alternate power source as well as the cable; there are many cheap USB cables that struggle to deliver 1A current. WAN & LAN ports are 1GB Ethernet ports.
Firmware is a bit buggy, client settings to my VPN provider disappeared at times and then only reappeared after a reboot. Scanning for new networks revealed nothing at times until after a reboot.
WiFi performance: on a 250 Mbs connection, this was able to achieve 130 Mbs connected to a 5GHz source with only 1 5GHz client connected connected to the Slate on speedtest. Connecting the WAN port directly to the modem provided WiFi 5GHz speed topping out at 165 Mbs. Enabling the VPN and connecting to my VPN provider, dropped the WiFi speed down to 13 Mbs (I tested more than 15 different speedtest servers, and most results were only high single digits). I was able to still stream 3 HD and one 720, but adding a 5th video stream at 720 caused buffering on 2 of the steaming devices. So for a family of 4 sharing an internet connection at a hotel/timeshare, as long as the connection at the resort is fast enough, everyone should be able watch their own video stream over the shared VPN connection (but not everyone will be watching a different movie at the same time, so this should suffice). If not using the VPN, then this was able to to achieve 130 Mbs with 1 client. Connecting 8 clients (7 streaming videos, and 1 speedtest), this router still delivered close to 100 Mbs on speedtest from a test site which was known to provide a 250 Mbs connection.
If the firmware was less buggy and it had a faster processor, then this would get 5 stars. But as it stands, I don't think there are any other companies that have a small form factor AC router that has both WISP & a OpenVPN Client, OpenVPN Server, Winguard VPN Client, and Winguard VPN Server. This does NOT support L2TP VPN Protocol. There are a variety of other functions this supports, but don't expect all the bells and whistles as a traditional full size home router. As for WinGuard VPN Protocol, although it seems to be very efficient, there appears to be NO commercial VPN service providers who support this VPN protocol at this time.
Got one of these configured with a VPN for use when I travel so that I can use a USA based VPN. I have it configured in "router" mode with a Shadowsocks VPN that I have at home. I just plug it into the LAN port where I'm staying and connect all my devices to it. They all then get a VPN connection without any further setup. It comes preinstalled with OpenVPN and Wireguard but the OpenWRT package library has Shadowsocks packages. I plan to switch over to Wireguard once that's final.
If your travel destination doesn't have a LAN port and only wireless access, you can also configure this device as a wireless repeater ("WISP" mode) but I haven't tested that yet.
This device also uses a custom OpenWRT based firmware. I have a standard OpenWRT device at home and this device's menu seems more streamlined/simplified. Everything that I need seems to be available, however.
Am hardly any authority on routers or networking, but am very happy with this little device. It's sold as a travel router, but in my situation, I can't find any good reason not to replace my large home router with this small one. The feature that attracted me initially was that it came with OpenWRT, on which the adblock package could be installed to filter ads and malware at a low level. The router seems to have plenty of memory to accommodate the many publicly available block lists.
The admin panel provides for modification of typical parameters, e.g., repeater mode on/off, wireless ids and passwords, port forwarding, LAN IP, MAC address, firmware upgrade, and more. One little choice off to the side says "Advanced." Selecting that puts you into the Luci menus for OpenWRT, which appear to allow setting of every imaginable parameter under the sun, including all the above as a small subset. One can log in directly to the small linux-like system (Busybox apparently) on the router. Very knowledgeable people (not me) perhaps could even issue the basic commands invoked by Luci.
My modem came with a wireless router. Had no choice about that. The AR750S is ethernet connected immediately downstream from the modem/router. A speed test via ethernet to the AR750S gave 209 megabits/sec. 200 Mbps is the rated speed of my ISP. A speed test via 5G wifi from the AR750S, at close proximity, yields 120 Mbs. The modem and router are upstairs in the house. Downstairs, in a largish old house (metal screen plaster lath in the walls), I see a wifi speed of over 90 Mbps for the AR750S, which is about 30% faster than my old, big router (-not- the built-in modem/router, which is very slow).
When I installed a router firmware upgrade via the GL menus, the upgrade threw away the installation of the adblock plug-in. It was easy to re-install, but I was a bit surprised. It looks as though the Luci menus may give an option to apply an upgrade and keep any added packages.
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