I have a GL.iNet travel router. When I am not travel, it connects to the router's second WAN port. If my main internet goes down, it takes me 30 seconds to tether my phone and failover manually. My carrier detects and throttles hotspot traffic by measuring packets TTL, so I tweaks the router's iptables to dodge that. Typically I get over 400 Mbps.
From time to time I get the itch to improve my home network uptime, and I have to keep reminding myself that the current setup is fine.
(Tangential, regarding GL.Net routers: I find it satisfying that these routers run OpenWRT out of the box, and top the "Travel routers" category on Amazon: "Overall Pick" and "Amazon's Choice".)
I run several GL.Net routers in a mesh across two continents, some have Starlink and cellular, some on regular ol' fiber. They are bulletproof, highly recommend.
It's probably because usually normal people don't but routers because they get them included in their internet subscription. So the people buying them have a specific reason to that normal routers don't do
It's a travel router which power users buy to get good connectivity away from home and office. An hotel won't offer you that (and chances are that they'll try to rip you off on their wifi).
Assuming you can find an Ethernet port to supply it, that is. Most hotels don't make them easy to find and use, if they even have them.
More common is that you use the travel router to connect to hotel WiFi and then share out that connection. It's slower than using directly, but it's great for family travel since you can name your travel SSID the same as your home network - all your usual devices will connect automatically, and will use any whole-connection VPN you have set up (most of the gl.inets will do Wireguard, OpenVPN, and Tailscale that I know of straight out of the box, and they will let you into luci or via SSH to configure the underlying OpenWRT directly for anything else). And, of course, it's just one device for hotels that try to limit the number of devices you use.
As far as travel and hotel goes, another huge benefit is that the router enables devices without captive portal support, on a recent trip I can use:
- Fi base station for my dogs trackers (huge for me)
- FireTV stick (no need to trust hotel streaming apps will clear your credentials like they claim)
Also I can WireGuard back home automatically for select IP ranges (no need to configure WireGuard separately on many of my devices)
Thank you for explaining this, I had always wondered how a carrier could tell a device was tethered if a router was not passing on tethered device details.
Another way to do it is to look for requests to domains that phones never access but desktops/laptops often do. Windows Update is the most common, but you could probably do apt package repositories or whatever.
I have a friend that is also curious. Their fibre cable was cut by addicts trying to find a source of copper that took a few days to be repaired. Using their hot spot during the outage used up their allotted hot spot bandwidth for the month. My friend would be very interested in how to avoid potential down time in the future.
Might I suggest an email address added to your HN profile, lest a publicly posted reply result in observation by a nefarious telecom employee who just might obviate the proposed solution to your friend’s conundrum.
I have AT&T Fiber and 99% of the time it's fantastic, but there are several instances of 30-60 second downtime a day and I have a 5G modem with a Google Fi data sim as a backup. Failover is nearly-instant with a Unifi UDM.
The data sim costs nothing extra on top of my cellular plan and just counts towards my (already very generous) monthly limit of 50GB.
Pulled the thread on this a bit and it seems that it will be highly carrier-dependent and will likely be flakey if it works at all.
TTL is one of the simplest methods carriers use to detect if there's an extra hop but very unlikely to be their only line of defense against methods like this.
From time to time I get the itch to improve my home network uptime, and I have to keep reminding myself that the current setup is fine.