I think most travel APs can generally do this, but the feature that makes GL.iNet products popular is: extensibility. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers, but making products useful via extensibility is a sure fire way to open your target market directly up to prosumers. And those are the buyers that will find you.

I own two of their products, one of them I bought in 2019 and can still run what I need to on it.

My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar150/) which is tucked behind her desk since at least 2019. Vanilla openwrt on it, provides WiFi from an Ethernet slot in the wall.

Uptime is in years, it’s invisible and chugs along without visible power draw. All her devices connect to it, including her Cisco voip phone. It autossh to my ovh server with remote port forward for remote admin. Cost me 15€ in 2016.

>> I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers

> My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (...) since at least 2019. All her devices connect to it (...) Cost me 15€ in 2016.

I think this answers GP's question as (yet another) solid reason why manufacturers "can't understand" prosumer needs - it's because targeting prosumers, or generally making products that "just works", is very bad for sales down the line.

Hehe. Bought TP LINK TL-WR1043ND (one of the first models of affordable home routers with integrated gigabit switch) in 2012 for $40 (maybe $50, but not more), flashed OpenWrt and still using to this day.

Isn't this considered to be "shadow IT"? and some enterprise networking devices have automated detection for such setups, I believe (?)

She's her own boss and shares her office space with 4 other people in medical space, no shadow IT there.

Since her desk is far from the internet router, I added this little guy for her to have less cables and allow more connectivity.

Maybe, maybe not.

Some companies aren't very big, and neither are their budgets. And of course, it might be said that there is no solution more permanent than a temporary one.

We've got a large-ish color laser printer (IIRC, an HP 4600) at one of our locations. It's not a big place; it has only had as many as 3 people working there regularly and has been normally staffed by exactly 1 person for the last several years.

When we moved into that building, a missing link was noticed: The printer did not feature wifi, and there was no way to get a clean ethernet drop to it without visible external conduit. The boss man didn't like the idea of conduit.

To get it working for now, I went over to Wal-Mart and bought whatever the current rev of Linksys WRT54G was. I put some iteration of Tomato on it so it could operate in station mode and graft the printer into the wifi network.

I plugged that blue Linksys box in back in 2007; it turned 18 years old this year.

It's pretty little slow by modern wifi standards, and the 2.4GHz band is much more congested than it used to be, but: It still works, and nobody seems motivated to spend money to implement a better solution... so it remains.

Readers of HN will value flexibility and extensibility, but the other 99% of the folks there are fine with totally locked-down devices because it’s the only thing they know of. The lack of extensibility likely doesn’t affect sales/profit in any significant proportion.

Where do you travel that you need wifi?

I’ve been getting SIM cards for over a decade, now even eSIMs are cheap enough for casual use.

I can’t put a SIM in my ereader or Switch or iPad.

Convenient to connect all devices to one WiFi. E.g. baby camera is on same WiFi as laptop etc.

Changing countries a lot reduces this option a bit.

I’m sure I could find a good all Europe card, but I need my number for work calls.

In Europe you have free roaming so it (almost?) never makes sense to get a new sim per country.

You have roaming but sometimes it’s less data than at home. And you can’t use it for months on end. I have multiple sims from various EU countries. When I visit I top up.

To be clear. Within the EU. Not Europe.

EEA, not EU. I had to check as I thought UK was also included. Seems like they left?

UK is not included, but most UK mobile networks have chosen to pretend the UK hasn't to their customers, and offer similar amounts of voice and data in the EEA, so it still mostly works "one way".

I think it's the other way around? Most UK networks seem to charge charge now (the big ones anyway, EE, Vodafone etc.).

At least in Germany, none of our networks do.

I'm with O2 and most certainly does not get charged extra when travelling within the EEA.