Hello, I have seen many recommendations about this company but as I am new I would like your advice because I respect you and I know that you know much more than I do about VPN and routers. I want to buy a router for the following: When I travel I connect to the hotel’s free Wi-Fi and I want the router to encrypt the connection using OPENVPN and thus be able to share my connection with my laptop and smartphone, I really like the speed and I know that when I connect the speed will decrease but it could support a speed range of 20-50mb of download. They could recommend 2 ROUTERS, one that is the cheapest but comes close to 20 mb and another one that is a little more expensive but that meets exactly, that is to say it can speeds of 20-50mb. Thank you very much.
Slate can probably go around 10mbps openvpn
Slate (GL-AR750S-Ext) Dual Band Gigabit Travel Router
Regular price$69.99
convexa-b can probably get you above 20mbps openvpn, but its not ‘travel router’ class anymore
Convexa-B (GL-B1300) Smart Home Gateway
From Regular price$89.00
if you change to wireguard vpn instead, then even the mango can go above 20mbps (openvpn 5mbps)
GL-MT300N-V2 (Mango) Mini Smart Router
Regular price$20.49
I have found that the numbers that GL.iNet publishes on their website for VPN performance have generally been reliable, conservative if anything. I see you already found
All-in-one routers fall into two or three general categories
- Single-core, MIPS-based, “value priced”, typically below 700 MHz clock rates, often Mediatek (MTK) chipsets
- Single-core, MIPS-based, 700 MHz or higher clock rates, often Qualcomm Atheros (QCA) chipsets
- Multi-core, ARM-based, often Qualcomm Atheros (IPQ) or Marvell (“mvebu”) chipsets
There is the added complexity of size – higher compute power means higher power consumption. This challenges using a USB cable for power (~5-10 W limit), as well as physical size (need to get rid of that heat in a tiny box).
OpenVPN is very compute intensive, so getting even 20 Mbps is out of the capabilities of the “value priced” units, and at the edge of what a good travel router (such as the GL-AR750S) can do. 50 Mbps with OpenVPN pretty much needs a multi-core, ARM-based device. Since these more powerful processors draw more power, they are not available in “travel-size” units, that I am aware of (Edit: with wireless included – the GL.iNet “Brume” is the same size as the GL-AR750S, but does not include wireless).
Getting 50 Mbps over OpenVPN requires a high-end, multi-core, ARM-based device or an x86_64 router. Neither of these is “cheap” – you’re looking in the US$120-250 range, then possibly adding a separate AP for the wireless.
WireGuard is much less compute-intensive than is OpenVPN. The mid-range, single-core, MIPS-based routers can generally get close to 50 Mbps over WireGuard. I have both the GL-AR300M (2.4 GHz only) and the GL-AR750S (2.4 and 5 GHz) which fall into this category. I travel with one of my GL-AR750S units.