TP-Link Roam 7 BE3600 Packs Fast Dual Band Wi-Fi 7 Into a Compact Travel Router

Hotel rooms, airport lounges, and Airbnbs often leave travelers sharing a single public network with strangers or struggling with a weak signal that drops during a video call. TP-Link’s Roam 7 BE3600 travel router, priced at $89.98 (was $130), solves that by sitting between any available internet connection and a private network that belongs only to the person who set it up.

The device measures around 5 by 3.7 by 1.4 inches and weighs about 6 ounces, making it small enough to fit inside a backpack or bag with some additional room after the flip up antennae are folded flat. Power is supplied via a normal USB-C port, which can pull 5 volts at 3 amps, allowing you to use a wall converter, a laptop charger, or a decent-sized power bank to get it going without the need for an internal battery.

A 2.5-gigabit WAN port accepts a fast cable connection from a hotel Ethernet jack or your home modem, while a separate gigabit LAN port routes that connection to a laptop or console. You also have a USB 3.0 connector, which allows you to connect a phone to your mobile network, a compatible USB cellular modem, or an external drive to transform the router into a basic file server for everyone on your private network. On the side, there is an action button that you can configure to power on the unit, toggle the status light, or establish a VPN session with the touch of a button. Once up and running, you can set it up using the TP-Link Tether app on your phone or a browser on any linked computer, and there’s even a one-step captive-portal tool to deal with pesky login pages that certain hotels and cafés like to use.

Dual-band WiFi 7 allows for a theoretical maximum of 2,882 megabits per second on the 5 GHz frequency and 688 megabits per second on the 2.4 GHz band. Multi-Link Operation allows compatible devices to communicate on both bands at the same time, resulting in higher speeds and lower latency, while 4K-QAM allows you to load more data into each transmission and Multi-RU makes better use of the bandwidth, making this a really strong bundle for a device this compact.Of course, real-world speeds will vary depending on your upstream connection and the client devices you’re using, but all of the reviews I’ve seen indicate that people are getting sustained rates above a gigabit at close range on the 5 GHz band, and the coverage is adequate for a typical hotel room or RV, so that’s pretty good. There is no 6 GHz radio here, which simplifies things and saves power, but also means it will miss out on the latest, least-used band.

Seventy different operating modes to accommodate every travel condition. Router mode creates a fully private network from either a wired or wireless connection. Hotspot mode allows you to join a public Wi-Fi network and rebroadcast it using your personal password. You can use the USB tethering and USB modem modes to connect to the internet using your phone or a cellular stick, as well as the access-point and range-extender modes to extend an existing network, and the client mode to bring wireless functionality to a wired device.

The unit supports up to 90 simultaneous connections, enough for a family of phones, tablets, and laptops plus a few smart devices. WireGuard and OpenVPN both run as client or server, with advertised peaks around 450 megabits per second for WireGuard and 350 megabits per second for OpenVPN, so a traveler can encrypt traffic on untrusted networks without a separate app on every device.