TBMax N150 Mbps Wireless Router

[Note that this box is in fact the GL-iNet 6416, which is also available here on amazon, http://www.amazon.com/Gl-iNet-Router-Openwrt-Mobile-Control/dp/B00JKFE0FW.]This box fulfills two roles for me:1) Cheap, small, easy-to-use travel router2) Great option for learning about OpenWRT, a super-powerful, infinitely configurable, open source replacement firmware for wireless routersIt is good enough at either of these tasks to earn my full recommendation.For the road-warriorThis little device checks all the boxes for me. It is inexpensive (and thus replaceable), small, easy to configure out of the box with smartphone apps, is highly configurable (runs OpenWRT under the hood (accessible from the configuration page)), has two Ethernet ports (WAN+LAN), runs off a micro-USB charger (which you probably already have), is extremely forgiving (i.e. easy to recover back to factory if you mess up a configuration), and has responsive technical support. Most likely for road-warrior usage, you will set it up as a wireless repeater (you connect to the hotel's wireless network, which provides the Internet, and then you connect your various devices to the router). VPN support is available, but you must find a VPN provider that supports (i.e. has instructions) for OpenWRT setups. A lot of support is available on the OpenWRT forums for this.For the HackerFirst, the company behind this (http://www.gl-inet.com/) is very pro-hacker, and provides many tools and support for tinkerers of all stripes and abilities. As far as I know, this is the only device available today that has OpenWRT pre-installed, and certainly the cheapest. It has an OEM GUI written on top of OpenWRT, which will help you when "you just need it to work", but the advanced button on the configuration page immediately reveals the OpenWRT (Luci) configuration page. You can easily update to a pure, vanilla OpenWRT firmware, following the directions here http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/gl-inet/gl-inetThere is an active forum thread to get you started here https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=59101. As mentioned above, it is pretty easy to factory reset the device if you botch your configurations while experimenting. It even supports DD-WRT, but I find OpenWRT more flexible.So the 6414 is an inexpensive, small, travel router with OpenWRT built in.Note that GL-iNet is coming out with a refreshed version of this device (AR150), but from my evaluation, the new model does not provide any substantial additions from this 6414 model (e.g. same chipset under the hood). The new version does come with an option for an external antenna, which costs a few dollars more. But for now, it is not available on Amazon (in fact, ships from Hong Kong), and is too new for the OpenWRT gurus to make builds of the trunk for the new device. It would work fine as is, but is not yet able to run the latest pure OpenWRT, In time, the AR150 will supplant the 6414, but most of this review will still stand (for either device).

First off, as others have noted, this device is the GL.iNET 6416 router. TBMax N150 is the seller's own branding; the device I received was a GL.iNet device and had no references to TBMax on it.The device is pretty versatile and can connect to a variety of different types of network connections and can provide both wired and wireless connections to clients connecting to it. The WAN port lets you connect the device to a hotel room's wired connection, which I've found can be much faster than WiFI in a lot of hotels, especially when that hotel happens to be hosting a tech conference...we techies are really good at saturating networks and, without getting too technical, I've found that a lot of hotels haven't implemented their WiFi networks in a well-optimized manner. Don't have a network jack available? No problem, the device can act as both a WiFi client (connecting to the hotel network) and access point (allowing your devices to connect to it) at the same time.Under the hood, the device is a full-fledged Linux computer, with 64Gb of RAM and a 400MHz Atheros processor, running the OpenWRT operating system. The 16Gb of on-board flash storage are more than enough to store the base OS and a generous number of add-on options. The included USB port can be used for pretty much anything you'd plug in to USB port on a regular computer: add an external hard drive to make it a file server, add a webcam to make it a security monitor, or even add a mobile network dongle and share your cellular data connection with all of your devices.My device came running an older version of OpenWRT (I believe it was a build of Barrier Breaker) with a custom GL.iNet-branded web interface that was pretty intuitive to use for basic configurations. It did not support VPN connections out of the box, however, so I decided to update to the latest OpenWRT build (Chaos Calmer) and added an OpenVPN client. Doing so looses the custom web interface, but OpenWRT's LUCI interface allows you to configure just about everything from the browser, albeit in a less intuitive manner.I bought this device to secure my Internet access when travelling, since most hotels have open, unsecured guest networks. A secure WiFi network that connects to an open network is no more secure than connecting to the open network directly, so adding OpenVPN support was essential to me. While it was not non-trivial to do, it wasn't overly difficult after following a number of tutorials I found for GL.iNET and TP Link (which are very similar hardware-wise) routers. In my final configuration, the router automatically connects to my preferred OpenVPN provider when it boots up, and then routes all traffic from the LAN side through the VPN, so that it's encrypted once it gets onto the open network. If the VPN connection goes down, the firewall settings I've chosen prevent any data from leaving the private network until the link is restored, so there is never a chance that anything will go out unencrypted.Pros:* cheap and small (fits easily in my laptop case, so I always have it with me)* runs off a computer's USB port or most any cell phone charger (note: the device comes with a USB power cable, but no AC adapter)* easy to modify to make it run exactly as you'd like* with some work, allows creating a secure tunnel through open networks* gets around per user device limits imposed on some networksCons:* VPN support is not plug-and-play--you need to do a fair amount of customization to get it working* Connecting to different WiFi networks is not as straight forward as you'd expect (you need to forget the currently configured network in order to add a new one...you can't just have a list of saved networks as you would on a laptop or phone)* Takes a fair amount of tweaking to get it working just rightThe bottom line: this device is perfect for anyone who's concerned with network security and isn't afraid to get their hands dirty by customizing Linux configurations. If you want plug-and-play, there are a number of VPN vendors that offer similar devices preconfigured to work with their services. If you already have a VPN provider you'd like to use and you don't mind a little Linux hacking, this device is a great choice.

This replaced a couple tplink tl3020 and 3040 units. I needed support for the pantech 295 and the stock firmware on those units don't support it. My wish list also included VPN support and DynDNS, among a few other things. The TL3020 and 3040 only have 4mb of rom, which severly limits their functionality when installing ddwrt or open-wrt packages.This unit solved all of that. First it's about 20% smaller, which is awesome. It has both WAN and LAN ports, another plus. I installed Rooter, a flavor of open-wrt, which has support for all of the features I needed and a lot more. Here's a link to the install package: http://ofmodemsandmen.com/download/MultiWeb318/gl-inet-6416A-v1-318-MW2015-03-14.zip. It's awesome, up and running with vpn and dyndns in 5 minutes!

This was such a great little router that I had to buy a second one to add to my network. The residential gateway that is provided by my internet provider is huge clunky & has a range at maximum power of only 1/2 the distance of this tiny little beast! So I bought this one, deactivated the built-in router on the gateway, plugged this baby in and I'm on the net with better security & better WiFi coverage.My first step was to get rid of the pre-installed router software by flashing the new OS (Gargoyle v1.7.1) onto it. After that it was all kinds of easy to get the two of them working together to extend our network to the back yard & still be secure.