GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 Opal Travel Router, AC1200 Dual-Band Wi-Fi

I bought this router to use with my Behringer digital mixer. The mixer has a built in router but it is not the best in the world. The signal can cut in and out which is not a good thing for a live gig. The router is very small. It will fit into the palm of your hand, which is perfect for the small rack I have my mixer mounted in. It hooked up easily and I was able to connect without any issues. This past weekend, I used it at a gig for the fist time. I was running the sound for an outdoor gig in a park. In the past, using the internal router in the mixer, I have had to stay close to the stage in order to keep connected and even then sometimes it cut in and out. That changed this weekend. The sound system ran from 11am to 4pm without one disconnection. I was able to walk around the park with my Samsung tablet and still make sound adjustments even as far away as 50 to 100 feet. I am very happy with this router. It's in a nice small package, easy to use, has reliable connection. I would recommend this to anyone doing local band gigs who need a small router to communicate with their router.

The GL.iNet Opal is a gem like it's namesake says. Bang for your buck, this is one of the best value in routers that exists. That said, it is an older router with limitations. Know before you buy: Look, this is NOT a power router with huge throughput for OpenVPN, WireGuard, or your favorite commercial VPN. It will work just great if you need to do normal day-to-day work, but if you're trying to move large files or backhaul multiple video streams via VPN, there are limits to its throughput. The reason is simple: VPNs use a lot of CPU and memory for the overhead of encryption. At this price-point you're not getting a huge processor or a lot of memory. If you need a lot of VPN throughput, then look at GL.iNet's higher-end travel routers for the same form factor and the throughput performance you are looking for. For everyone else, this is the travel router you want. It is an OpenWRT router (though not capable of the newest builds) and will support all of the features you would expect on a router 2-4x the price. Very easy to setup and administer to share an internet connection through tethering to your cell phone or sharing a public WiFi. This device is also easily setup as a VPN server behind your typical NAT primary router by port forwarding. Range is good for the travel form-factor and power consumption. It doesn't hold a candle to the range of my primary router at home, but it still covers the entirety of our 6,000sf home, just at lower signal & throughput a the furthest distances.

So far, just by following the video instructions for tethering iPhone's internet (using iphone's hotspot) everything went very satisfactorily. I was able to set up my Wyze pan cam in my office , at work, where I usually have an enterprise wifi connection (that doesnt allow any private wireless cameras to their wifi network). By using my iPhone's hotspot I could use this router to broadcast a wifi signal that my wifi camera could detect. I used the browser from my iphone 11, to keep things easy. If you log into the Admin portal (gateway) while using a computer, the user interface might look different and can complicate things for those who are not used to working with computers. I made sure I turned off the 5Ghz bandwidth because my wifi camera only connects to 2.4Ghz. Then I followed the steps from the video shown on here (on amazon), where pictures show the features of the router. Then I renamed the SSID of router to make it less obvious on the network from work. I also changed the password for the SSID to something else because by default the password is "goodlife", and anyone could use your wifi if they see your default SSID (GL - ....) and google the manufacturer's default password for that device. In case you wanna use it (as I did) to connect your security wifi camera on your iphone in your office , or even in your car, while using your phone's hotspot, you can follow the instructions from the video of this router from amazon. You'll have to connect your iphone to the router at some point , according to the instructional video (I used the USB port too) , and then put your Wyze pan camera in set up mode, follow the steps for setting up your camera, and you're connected. I noticed that the connection might not be stable based on how good your Hotspot connection is in that area. That causes my router to show a "growing blue light " on the router as if it would keep try to get internet from the iphone. My LTE data in my office is bad because the building affects my cell signal. But Im glad because I can still record with my security camera even after i disconnect from the camera to leave home for the day. The camera keeps recording after that on its 256GB microSD card. And I can review the recordings next day on my phone's Wyze app, when I connect to the router. So, the point is that this router helped me achieve what other pocket routers like TPLink, could not. The easy user interface for tethering made the difference, plus the instructional video. I gotta say that this router still requires a basic willingness to learn how to use a computer or an iphone, because even the concept of "tethering" could be too difficult to people if they 're not used to spending some time with experimenting with technology. Shalom!

Firmware 4.8.3: this update, released 2026-07-03 has been a MAJOR improvement! Logging into captive portals is so much easier and reliable now with this update. I am therefore changing my review rating from 1 to 4 stars. Can’t give it 5 stars because of all the hours and hours of frustration this unit caused me with the previous firmware version. The VPN dashboard massively improved too. In the past week I’ve stayed in six different hotels and each time logging into the hotel’s captive portal has been very easy, unlike with the prior FW version. I’m glad this thing is working so well now because I’ve invested so much time documenting my setup with detailed screenshots of all my configuration requirements. (The online documentation for this device is not adequate, IMO). Another thing that may have improved operational reliability for me is enabling only one wireless 5G network. I’ve configured the two guest networks and the 2G network, but I leave those radios disabled, and that, at least with previous firmware, improved device reliability. The device is also setup to reboot itself each morning at 01:00 am. Sometimes, at some hotels, I will need to manually authenticate with the hotel network again in the morning, but I think that is due to older hotel systems that don’t cache successful client authentications. Anyway, I’m here to report good news with this firmware update! Previous Updated Review: On a recent trip overseas I had better luck with this thing, even successfully logging into a hotel's captive portal. HOWEVER, it's totally hit or miss. I got more success when I disabled the 5G radio and just used it in 2G mode all the time. Three different hotels over a 20 day period and a total of about 5 reboots -- it generally worked. However, on morning of my last day it seemed to crap out. I'm so tired of troubleshooting this thing. So many times I've resorted to the "nuclear option" of resetting the firmware and re-entering all settings and passwords. I don't want to do that anymore. I want to get something better, but I see comments like this for all the other "travel" sized routers too. Again, I think that deleting WAN access points no longer needed (like hotels you're not coming back to) is one part of this multi-faceted problem. I use a VPN with this device, but the real advantage is that after you connect this router to the host network, ALL your already paired WiFi devices then auto-connect to the router when you move from hotel to hotel. This is the convenience I'm seeking, but unable to get reliably from this model. Prior Review: Before traveling I had it set up for a few months at home and it worked fine in repeater mode for weeks without reboot or tweaking of any kind. I had my phone and tablet connect to this router and they were able to re-establish Wi-Fi connection without problem as I came and went. The device apparently was able to routinely re-negotiate DHCP leases transparently. No hiccups at all. I would give the device a 4+ rating. (My gripes would be with the organization of the web pages on the interface.) However, after more than four weeks of travel I have to downgrade my rating of the device due to near endless frustration trying to connect to “captive portals” some of my hotels use. Before upgrading to firmware 4.3.25 I was NEVER able to connect the device to a captive portal (where you need to log in on a web page and provide additional credentials to gain Wi-Fi access). I have spent hours and hours scouring the web and YouTube videos seeking help, but nothing seemed to work. At the three week mark I decided to upgrade the firmware to 4.3.25. It then seemed I was able to get through at least one captive portal. Just once, but not at the next hotel. Again, I spent hours on this. I finally decided on the nuclear option: reset the device to factory settings and reconfigure. That worked! For the next two hotels I didn’t have any problems. However, at a new hotel last night the device worked for an hour and then it is unable to reconnect to the internet — and there’s no captive portal here. My next step is to do a factory reset again, reconfigure, including VPN credentials, and I expect it will work again. One action that might correlate with this problem is deleting access points for hotels I’m not returning to. I am hoping for a firmware upgrade that will fix this annoying and recurring issue. I do not want to be doing a factory reset at each new hotel!

Great travel router! It’s compact, easy to set up, and provides a reliable and secure Wi-Fi connection. Perfect for traveling and working on the go. Highly recommend!

Works great! I love traveling with it. All my devices automatically connect to it so I don't have to reconnect several devices every time I'm in a different hotel. I enjoy all the customization I can apply with VPNs. The app works well but you'll want to use the webpage if you can or for deeper customization. Tested on my home wifi, most my wireless devices can get up to ~600mb/s. The router seems to typically max out around 60mb/s. For traveling and hotel wifi thats fine. There isn't many times I have the luxury of having public wifi faster than that.

This little travel router is an awesome little workhorse. It does a great job of keeping us connected when we travel with the benefit of not having to deal with limits on how many devices we can connect to hotel wifi like some places have. We connect this device only and enjoy the fact that all of our other devices already recognize if because they've already connected to it before, saving the need to log in to the hotel wifi separately for each device we have. The speed is quite sufficient for streaming when the available wifi is fast enough, signal strength is good and has never failed to provide great connectivity in any location we've taken it to. The setup is reasonably simple for anyone who understands what a router does, using the internal web app interface and the included instructions. I recommend setting it up at home on your home wifi and then connecting any devices you travel with to it with them set to remember the connection. This makes it a simple matter to connect the router at your destination and have all of your devices automatically connect to the router every time. The controls are simple and the instruction book is clearly written. One upgrade I'd recommend is to purchase a small case to keep the router and accessories in to minimize the chance of misplacing them. The one we bought was inexpensive and suggested by Amazon when we bought the router and it holds and organizes the router, power supply, and cables perfectly.

Significant update for 5ghz wifi instability at the end of the review.... The following was earlier in the year.. I'm a little skeptical a out the 5ghz radio. My current setup is in my RV with this used as an access point to my wired router with Starlink. I have the wifi 2.5 and 5ghz seperated because of some older devices that wont connect to the combined setup. I've noticed throughout the day if i do a speedtest to fiber test servers I get speeds of less than 60 mbps while on the 5ghz. I will then toggle to the 2.4 ghz and back to the 5ghz and the speedtests are now where they should be at 260 mbps+. I've found myself having to do this multiple times throughout the day doing speed tests. I have both radios on max power and have adjusted the 5ghz frequency all over the operating spectrum with the same results. Don't know what to make of it. Other than that, the router seems to be capable of great stuff Update... Replacement ordered. 2.4ghz and 5ghz both throttle down to 20-30 mbs download after awhile. Could be 5 minutes or 2 hours Both have to be toggled or disconnected and reconnected to regain full capable download speeds. I have adjusted and locked each frequency on specific channels. Tried disabling and re enabling certain bands. Changing power supply cords. Swaped the cat 6 cables from wan to lan and back again. Used different cables. Firmware downgrades and upgrades. I have tested every changable option in the Luci advanced settings for the wifi. Absolutely nothing fixed this issue. Im hoping this was just a dud router Next update: New router recieved and setup. Problem persists in access point mode. Seems that 5g speeds kick down to 30mbps or less after awhile of connection. Only correction to this is to toggle to the 2.4ghz ssid and then toggle back to the 5ghz ssid. Simply turning wifi off and back on, without toggling out if the 5ghz, does nothing to correct the issue. My Roku device has been experiencing the same results. In my opinion, that makes this device a complete dud. Don't know its a hardware or firmware issue. Both Opal devices showed this problem. Months later..... Determined to figure out what was really going on, i found that my old Samsung s10+ did fine on 5ghz wifi for days. So i was set on the notion that possibly my pos Motorola edge 2023+ i use all the time was having the issue. Tried reseting the phone's network settings to no avail. Looking back into the opal's advanced settings (luci), I navigated to network:wireless: (radio 1:master "your ssid 5ghz". Scroll to the bottom for Interface Configuration. Select Advance settings tab underneath. At the bottom is an option to check "Disassociate On Low Acknowledgement". Mine was checked, so I unchecked it and it seams that this is the fix! My Motorola nows stays stable with the 5g wifi giving me full bandwidth without interruption. According to Google.... ""Disassociate On Low Acknowledgement" is a wireless setting in routers (common in OpenWrt, DD-WRT) that forces an access point (AP) to drop clients if they fail to acknowledge packets, often due to weak signals or inactivity. Disabling this feature often resolves random Wi-Fi disconnections, authentication errors, or sluggish throughput on mobile devices." Hoping this may help someone. I upgraded the stars from 1 to 4.

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Je cherchais un petit routeur pour mon équipement d'astronomie afin de pouvoir piloter et surveiller à distance mon télescope. Après quelques hésitations à cause d'un commentaire inapproprié et rédigé par un incapable je me suis tout de même décidé à le commander. Je ne regrette pas mon choix et je le recommande vivement. Ce petit routeur est performant et extrêmement facile à configurer. Il est même possible d'accéder aux réglage avancés par son interface web et de définir des adresses statiques pour les équipements connectés. Beaucoup d'autres réglages sont également disponible. Pas besoin de documentation, n'importe quel utilisateur avec un minimum de connaissance réseau pourra le configurer selon ses besoins.

works as expected, neat size, value for money

**Kompakter Router mit vielen Möglichkeiten** Der GL.iNet Opal funktioniert zuverlässig und bietet für seine kompakte Größe erstaunlich viele Möglichkeiten. Einrichtung und Bedienung sind unkompliziert, WLAN und LAN laufen stabil. Besonders praktisch sind OpenWrt, VPN und die vielseitigen Anschlussmöglichkeiten. Ideal für Reisen oder als flexibler Zweitrouter. Bin sehr zufrieden.

Klockren liten router som passar fint i husbilen!