I've heard lots of good about the Cradlepoint router. In addition to acting as a standard travel wireless router it also enables you to share a USB modem.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16875997455
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16875997431

i like the zoom 4506, travel router, which has a battery that lasts about 3 hours (or uses ac power), a usb port that supports a lot of usb modems and cellphones (including the iphone) and is also 802.11n.

I've only done this once and it was with a friends hotel wifi connection. They were looking at the MAC address to allow connectivity so if you tried to use two different devices it would get black flagged. I had TMAC installed on my machine and simply copied his MAC address onto my computer, and then switched on the wifi. Didn't have any problems for the 15mins I was using it in the lobby, and he was able to continue working.

I wish I had read these posts before went on vacation, we have just spent two weeks in a resort with a wired connection. I now see the value of a travel router.
The only thing that I am struggling to work out is how to connect the router to the LAN in the hotel room. By that I mean, in the resort we were in we had to accept the terms and conditions of the services in a browser. How do I do this with a travel router or am i just missing something so simple?

You're missing something so simple. You just use a computer connected to your travel router as you normally would.

You're missing something simple: the first computer to access the network via the travel router will get the terms and conditions message. When accepted, the hotel system sees that as having been accepted by the router, and any machines being used "behind the router" all look like one machine.

So simple I didn't even think of it.

Cheers

Ok do I've read every post on this thread trying to link one to my problem. I'm on a hotel and the wifi signal is like 80% and although that's strong enough to perform my work activities with my computer I was looking to make it stronger mainly to open the NAT. I've read about the Asus and the apple airport express and the few others but since I have no control of the hotels router I was looking for one that either makes its own strong wifi with an open NAT or does the same with the existing one. Can this be done or am I stuck with my moderate NAT?

What do you mean by "open NAT" and "moderate NAT?" What does NAT have in any way to do with the strength of the signal?

Taking a guess: if your VPN will not work through the hotel router, adding another router of your own between the hotel's wireless and your computer will not help.

I now use the airport express exactly as you describe. It takes about 2 sec to plugin and all my devices remember the password so I don't have to set it up each time. And you don't need an apple device to use it - works great with my company Lenovo laptop.

Welcome to FT.

The NAT portion was more pleasure than business. It's more useful to me with online games. Signal isn't the issue as much as the NAT is in this aspect. Didn't know whether that could be done. However I appreciate your timely and informational response.

This still doesn't make any sense. I think you're referring to something else, and calling it NAT.

I'm still confused by the way you're referring to NAT there -- if you mean "I can't open ports through the hotel's NAT in order to play online games" then once again, like with a VPN, if the hotel doesn't offer a way to open ports up then your own router won't help -- it is still just providing another level of NAT inside the hotels.

Indeed, in some cases (less likely for VPN than for games) it is likely to hurt; most routers will work with games (etc) to open ports via UPNP, while it's less than clear that those same routers will pass the UPNP requests to open ports "up the chain" to a outer router. I have never checked whether most larger hotel routers do UPNP (although a few smaller ones which had say, a Linksys, clearly did) but you are probably better off avoiding your own router for doing gaming.

NAT, Router, VPN, SSID, Ports/ Services...

All different technical terms. Read them up on Google/ Wiki. The above just confused me.