WiFi Travel Hack

I've been doing this for years and I thought I'd share.

When my wife and I travel with our two kids, we usually have an assortment of WiFi devices. This includes:
  • Two Phones
  • 1 iPod Touch
  • 1 iPad
  • 2 Kindles
  • 1 laptop (not that often, usually when going to a country we have to fly to)
When staying a hotel, it's common that the hotel WiFi system (free or paid) only allows a single device to be registered at any given time. This poses a challenge when you want all the devices connected. This is especially true when you are in a foreign country and your devices only get WiFi access cause you don't want to use local data on your phone.

So what I do is bring a long an Apple Airport Express, and I configure it with the same SSID name and password as I use on my home network. This means that all my devices think they are at home when they arrive in the hotel room and I connect the Airport to the broadband connection in the room. This means zero setup and the devices just "work" seamlessly allowing you to share a common connection. Plus you have great signal strength, your own NAT and firewall protecting you from any nasties on the local network... including people trying to steal and hack your unencrypted traffic.

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So there you go. You can get one for $99 from Amazon. The new model doesn't have the wall plug like the old model, which I prefer. 

I am sure companies other than Apple make little guys like this, but since Apple makes them and they are so easy to find and purchase, this is what I use. Also the Airport app for iOS makes any firmware updates or configuration changes a snap.