Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority
Travel routers definitely have their place in the market. However, some of the primary benefits of travel routers can be easily replicated by the Android flagship in your pocket, and it might help you save money on your next trip.
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One big complaint when traveling is that hotels, cruises, and airlines often charge for internet on a per-device basis. The first and second devices are usually provided with free Wi-Fi, but you have to start paying if you want to connect additional devices. Even when I travel alone, I frequently end up with four personal devices (two phones, a laptop, and a tablet), so I have to ration the internet connection among them. The situation worsens if I am traveling with family and friends.
A travel router slots into this use case by allowing you to use only one connection with Wi-Fi and have all your personal devices connect to the travel router.
A travel router also helps you deal with a captive portal screen (the login screen that appears when you connect to public Wi-Fi) only once, rather than having to deal with it on a per-device basis. If you have more than a couple of devices, this can get tiresome very quickly. Some devices cannot handle captive portals at all, so they are often stuck without internet if you don’t rely on a travel router.
If you own a recent Android flagship, chances are you can already use it as a makeshift travel router for the above use cases through Wi-Fi sharing functionality.
As Kaushik Gopal reminds all of us, your Android phone can connect to a Wi-Fi network and then doubles up as a hotspot for your other devices to connect to and share that same Wi-Fi network. This differs from your regular hotspot connection, where you share your mobile data connection; in this case, you are sharing/repeating a Wi-Fi connection.
Using Wi-Fi sharing on Android, you can bypass per-device connection limits. You also have to deal with captive portal login screens only once. Wi-Fi sharing also helps re-enable local discovery on public networks — your connected devices can now “see” each other on your phone’s Wi-Fi network.
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