I agree. I would not purchase anything bigger them my Slate for a travel router. The Beryl is even too big and heavy for me to want to carry it while traveling.
I understand that. But ā¦
butā¦ youād like to give me one of the new routers to test as I travel to see if itās too big 
I would have replied earlier but I was traveling! I used the Beryl all week and it performed wonderfully. Honestly, in a travel router all I need is fast openvpn or wireguard performance and good compatibility with hotel wifi. Sharing files, using it as a network share and other options are low on my list of a need (Iām sure others find a use for it but I donāt in my case).
All Iām looking to do is be secure and connect to my VPN of choice (in my case, a wireguard server on my home network) with fast performance.
Only if you can send detailed test report. How about that?
Battery or itās not a travel router.
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Oh Comon we donāt need a battery, worse case we can use a powerbank
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yeah and instead of a battery just a capacitor as part of the internal power circuit to address brief disconnects when connected to a PD port
The use of travel routers will increase in car, on person, left in hotel room or airbnb. With it, their portablity and devices that stay connected and disconnected around them whether internet connectivity is availble or not. a small battery for some portablity (that can hopefully be placed where there is less heat) would handle power miss connections and also supply an RTC. If you build it they will come.
Sometimes I think we are trying to put too much technology in a small package, and calling it a travel router. Iām on extended travel right now and I like to be connected when Iām in my apartment, but the WIFI router in the place I am renting dies every few days, and it seems to take them a day to reset it, so when that happens, I take out my trusty old USB150, plug it into a small USB battery, and set it out on the edge of my patio where I can just reach the local coffee shop WIFI, and I can continue on. Carrying a USB150 takes up almost no space, and no one has a clue what is really setting on my patio, so no one bothers it, and it runs for about 12 hours on a charge.
All the new routers from GL iNet are big, heavy, and use lots of power due to all the cool new features that many people donāt need when on travel. They also look like full routers. Even my old AR750s has raised questions from custom agents on what it is and why am I bringing it into their country. No one questions a USB150. It is a shame there are no new small packaged travel routers.
Maybe one day someone can figure out how to load OpenWrt on old Android phones, and we can just use them for travel routers, as they have dual band WIFI radios, fast CPUs, lots of RAM, SSD/eMMC storage and batteries. As a plus, they donāt look like routers. This beats putting them into the landfills.
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Looking forward to wifi7 which claims that Low power chipset is possible.
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love my usb150. Iāve posted before that it sould be awesome if there was a ver 2 with the following. 128mb 64mb dual simultanes 2g 5g wireless and a usb-c connection to address the power consumption. I would pre-order 10 right now as it would make a great christmas gift to friends and family.
The dual wireless is one of the reasons the wifi routers got bigger. The GL-AR300M/shadow for example was a router they wanted to give 2 + 5GHz wifi, but thermals prevented that.
On one side people want a powerful and quick router with good range. On the other side people want a small package. Thatās a balancing act.
Maybe GL-inet should look into how the TL-WR902AC did fit its package in that router. Itās dual band and small! I guess that heat-seek got them pretty far!
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You should check the E750. It takes almost no space and has build in battery. It"s a real travel router
The E750 has nice specs, but I almost never need a cell router. What I am really looking for is something small for WIFI.
I know I will totally get beat up for saying this, but if we want to look at what is possible to put into a very small package, that supports 2.4G/5G WIFI, supports 4G and 5G cellular, and has a battery, we need to look at the technology in an iPhone 13 mini. If I did the numbers correctly, it uses 1/4 the space of a E750 and is 1/2 the weight and it has a lot more RAM, CPU and SSD. It would be even smaller and lighter if it did not have cameras. Apple has shown, for a price, that the technology exists to build very small routers. Yes, I know this is an āappleā to āorangeā comparison, but I am just trying to point out that the technology exists today to build smaller routers. Is using this technology viable in the market place? That is a question for GL iNet and other router companies.
Iām not going to beat you up for suggesting a $750 device is pointing a path. 
But you are right that smartphones are driving SOC and power use powerfully in the direction of better travel routers.
There is a path out there to repurpose an obsolete Android smartphone as a repeater with Netshare (using Wifi Direct). With the US shutdowns of 2G and 3G, my Nexus 6P, for example, is dead weight. Lots of memory and horsepower, but limited functionality as a router. So unless there is a need to travel in sheepās clothing, there isnāt much point.
In the meantime, there is the Mango for hopping around and Slate/Opal/Beryl for longer term nesting. This thread is about taking something like those and turning it into a beast.
Iād say the size difference between the GL-AR750 Creta and the two WR902AC_V3 I own can easily be neglected. In addition the Creta has doubled RAM, doubled Flash, 2 LAN ports, a ĀµSD card reader to keep the USB free for a 4G stick when additional space is required. CPU is equally weak on both. Iām now at a point where I need 32 MB flash at least for GL-iNet interface, luci, Samba, tiny ftpd, igmpproxy and adblock. On the AX1800 Flint I donāt need the GL-iNet UI with the repeater settings at all. But I retired it for now until the firmware becomes actually usable. This showed me again how invaluable openness is and I shouldnāt have pardoned that.
I use a WR902AC_V3 (Mediatek chipset) for freifunk and another one for meteobridge. But on the road I use the GL-AR750 Creta. I also had a look at the GL-SFT1200 Opal but the Siflower CPU is weak per clock cycle and 1 GHz clock frequency doesnāt help it at all. A few iterations later Siflower might be a good contender like Mediatek and Qualcomm.
I realize this is a bit late but I think a killer feature that no one else has, is the option to proxy via the router configuration page to a captive portal via an iframe (or some other mechanism like a remote renderer on an HTML5 canvasā¦ maybe flutter for web can do something here).
If you google all of the pain and multiple steps required for captive portals (mess with dns, etc), and since the primary use/case is a travel router, this would make a lot of peopleās lives much easier.
I mean, itās at least half a dozen steps jumping across multiple screens and devices when I use my 750 to deal with hotel captive portals.
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I have an interest in a solution to the pesky problems of captive portals, although I have never experienced them except on Delta flights. But I didnāt understand you.
Can you detail your half a dozen steps?
Before we had a plugin to detect and auto deal with portals.
But is not so reliable and use experience is no better than manual settings. So abort it.
Sorry for the delay in replying. Yeah, so Delta flights are one use case but if you think about hotels like Marriot, Hilton, etc, they all pretty much have captive portals.
I get the plugin must have been flaky, especially with a diverse ecosystem. Iāve known a few people that needed to implement captive portal logic on CE devices. I was thinking about this a bit more today but havenāt proven anything out.
Since the router āownsā DNS, it may be possible to proxy to the captive portal. So letās say I have a device connected to the router and I go to news.google.com in a captive portal environment. The captive portal grabs DNS and does a 302 redirect to its sign in page. If the router acts as a reverse proxy in captive portal mode, with a really low TTL for the DNS, it may be able to pass the captive portal redirect through to the connected device. So the DNS resolution in this case, is a short lived proxy running on the travel router, and any DNS entry will resolve to the proxy.
Once connected and out of captive portal land, DNS then resolves normally.
The trick here is detecting if itās a captive portal. Maybe there can be a trick with DNS TXT records or some super simple web page to trick the redirect. So a fetch of say, captiveportalland.gl-inet.com resolves to a āno you are notā or if, instead it results in a redirect, the logic would say yes.
Again none of this is personally tested so take it all with a grain of salt :). But I sense that a solution can be found in DNS.