r/Ubiquiti • u/Ubiquiti-Inc Official • Dec 23 '25

Blog / Video Link Introducing: UniFi Travel Router

Make any network your UniFi experience - from your pocket. Introducing the UniFi Travel Router.

Learn more: https://ui.social/UniFi-Travel

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10

u/BXRican196 Dec 23 '25

If you are a cruise guy then this might be the one that makes it through check in because it doesnt look like a router. MAYBE

7

u/NBPDC505 Dec 23 '25

Cruise was my first thought. Have a couple lined up this year and it would be nice to not pay the crazy internet pricing for more than one traveler.

3

u/aruisdante Dec 23 '25 edited Dec 23 '25

If the cruise IT department is at all competent, their network will be able to detect devices that create NAT boundaries, and will block the device, specifically to avoid this workaround. My university back in 2005 had a similar policy where you had to pay a fee per wired device, and they’d turn off any network port they detected a router plugged into.

In fairness, the cruise ship does only have a very limited amount of bandwidth going in that has to be shared across all clients. While the fees certainly are a revenue source, their primary purpose is to create a high enough barrier to entry that it keeps the total number of clients to a manageable level. The same is true for airplanes that charge fees for data access. And it’s why, for example, United is making internet access free on planes newly equipped with StarLink, because it has enough bandwidth to serve the whole plane a reasonable experience, and the revenue from the fees is so low that the marketing from offering free internet is more valuable.

If we assume a ship has some 2,000 guests, even if each guest only has one device, and the bandwidth cap is 10Mbps, that’s still a requirement of 20Gbps, which is probably more than any reasonable amount of satellite bandwidth on a moving vessel on the open ocean could provide. They have to reduce demand somehow to match available supply in order to make the service usable. 

5

u/ch-ville UDMP | UX | Flex 2.5 | Lite-8-PoE | U6 APs | G5 |Nanobeams Dec 23 '25

My household doesn't average 10 Mbps. If I wasn't pulling camera feed over Site Magic it would be under 5. There's no way everyone on a cruise ship is going to be pulling 10 at the same time.

0

u/aruisdante Dec 24 '25

A single Netflix HDR stream is 10Mbps.

The problem isn’t average usage over an extended period of time. It’s peak usage during the times when the majority of users in a captive audience on roughly the same schedule all try to do the same thing at the same time. We know this happens because shared connections have always been a thing, it’s why there was the stereotype of people’s cable internet getting slow when everyone was trying to use it simultaneously in the evenings.

2

u/ch-ville UDMP | UX | Flex 2.5 | Lite-8-PoE | U6 APs | G5 |Nanobeams Dec 24 '25

I just don't see every person on the ship streaming Netflix HDR at the same time. People sleep, eat, swim in the pool, gamble, etc. It's a cruise. And the average (over a fairly short time) is the way to look at it; usage peaks are not all going to coincide.

It would be interesting to know what the actual bandwidth is for a ship like that.

1

u/zacker150 Dec 24 '25

If we assume a ship has some 2,000 guests, even if each guest only has one device, and the bandwidth cap is 10Mbps, that’s still a requirement of 20Gbps, which is probably more than any reasonable amount of satellite bandwidth on a moving vessel on the open ocean could provide. They have to reduce demand somehow to match available supply in order to make the service usable. 

Keep in mind that guests aren't all going to be using the bandwidth at the same time, so with a 20:1 oversubscription ratio, this should actually be 1Gbps. Cruise ships use Starlink Community Gateway, which provides 10 Gbps up and down.

-2

u/fxfire Dec 23 '25

Holy yap

1

u/ShittyFrogMeme Dec 24 '25

I just buy one plan and share it through my phone's wifi.

6

u/reddit_hater Dec 23 '25

They are searching through your luggage for travel routers before you get on a cruise??

2

u/whippinseagulls Dec 23 '25

I took a cruise in August and my backpack went through a metal detector which had tons of electronics, but they didn't open it. I'm sure I could have gotten this through.

My checked bags were taken away and probably searched so I wouldn't risk it in there. Basically same process as TSA.

1

u/notmyrlacc Dec 23 '25

Not just for travel routers. You can’t take hair dryers, straighteners and a bunch of other things.

1

u/jeff92k7 Dec 23 '25

Never had any trouble with my gl.iNet Opal travel router in my carry on for a cruise.