TP-Link AC750 Wi-Fi Travel Router

I lost two computer monitors in transporting them in my car. Of course, the fault is my own… but it also says something about the durability of these monitors. Fortunately, they are cheap to replace, but it’s all a bit inconvenient for me. I still have the Alienware OLED monitor that is coming in my shipping container. I used the original packaging for the monitor – so hopefully it will be in working order once they arrive… but at this point, if it arrives broken, I would not be one bit surprised at all.

The other funny thing that happened to me was that the cleaners took my Straight Talk Home Internet (Tracfone) and threw it in their landfill. I didn’t think I would get it back, so I called Tracfone to deactivate the device and cancel my internet service. After talking to the cleaners, they kept an eye out for it and found the internet modem and returned it back to me.

I called to reactivate my service a few days later, and, you’ll never guess, they couldn’t do it. I don’t know what the big deal was, if you can turn off my service, you can turn it back on, right? I don’t know why it’s so complicated. I got frustrated talking to someone in another country, especially because I felt like this is such a simple thing to fix. You just reactivate my service, right? I guess, once something is deactivated, it can never be re-activated?

So, after three years of using this service, I will likely be shopping around for another home internet service. I don’t know if they have Fiber in my area, or what is being offered… but I’m definitely never going back to Straight Talk after this incident.

Before I discovered the home internet service in Oct 2022, I was entertaining the idea of running my whole home off my phone’s internet, via Visible’s unlimited data plan.

Visible put in place some restrictions, such as you can only tether (hotspot) to one device with a 5mbps cap. While it’s much slower than 100mbps on the native phone, 5mbps is usable. You’re just not going to be streaming in HD or doing online video games… but that’s just fine for me. The only problem is that one device restriction.

There are several ways to get around the one-device restriction. You can look online on how to do this, from getting an iPhone or jailbreaking your phone’s OS… but I found the best way of doing this is to hotspot to a wireless router.

You need to buy a portable router that has the ability to connect to your hotspot. The one I own is the $40 TP-Link AC750 Wireless Portable Nano Travel Router (TL-WR902AC), which has the ability to connect and then share internet access using the small “share internet” button on the side of the device.

The best way to connect to a hotspot is to use a laptop (or iPad) to first connect to the pocket router. Once you’re connected to the router, you can now manage it by going to tplinkwifi.net or 192.168.0.1. The login by default is admin with the password admin. Once you log in, you should probably change the default password.

Now you can search for your hotspot and once you found it, you can connect to it with your hotspot password.

Once the router is connected to your phone, it will now share the internet. Overall, this solution is pretty neat and it’s working for me. You’ll need to reset all your cameras or smart display previously connected to another network. I’ve had to do this with a Lenovo Smart Display and now it is working under the new connection.

Now for some downside to this janky method: download and upload speed are slow. There is no way around this, this is the restriction that Visible placed on their hotspot – probably to discourage people from using it as a home network.

Internet access is sometime unreliable, particularly during congested network activities. For example, you might be watching a YouTube and it’s going okay … until it just stops because there’s no connection. In about a minute, the stream continues. So it’s not a great experience.

You’ll sometime lose connection to the hotspot, due to the phone restarting or random drops or if you change the password or name. Once you get disconnected, I do not believe it will automatically reconnect, so you need to log back into the router’s IP address and re-enter the hotspot password.

The other downside, because you’re constantly using cellular data, it does drain your phone’s battery constantly. You basically need to plug the phone into a power source all day.

Also, using too much bandwidth may result in Visible cancelling your contract or disabling services. So far, this seems to be working for me.

For the price of FREE, I think it’s fine. I am still going to be searching for a home internet product though.