More on Travel Routers - Bridge Mode

Here's a simple tip with more on the September 23, 2020 Tip of the Night on Travel Routers.

Keep in mind that most people will operate travel routers through an app on their smartphones. So in order to make this work, you connect your phone to the wifi network for the router. This will initially mean that the phone will be temporarily offline, if you are using the travel router as a bridge for wifi, and not as an access point with an ethernet cable plugged into the travel router run from a modem.

Use the app for the travel router to connect to the wifi network in your workspace - NOT the regular system settings on your iPhone or Android. This will not only allow the travel router to act as a bridge for other devices that want to use the travel router's extended wifi network, but it will also put your phone back online.

Bridge mode wifi speed will be 50% of the wifi speed available when the travel router is used as an access point.

PPPoE / DHCP / L2TP / PPTP

Here's some basic info on different types of network connections.

An internet service provider may use PPPoE or DHCP network protocols to provide access for multiple users to the internet. While litigation support professionals don't need to have a sophisticated understanding of networking to do their jobs, these days when nearly everyone has a modem and router set-up in their home, if not a switch as well, it's good to have a general idea of how they work.

A PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) network protocol involves the ISP allowing multiple users to share a broadband server, and requires that they each have a user name and password. The ISP monitors user traffic for billing purposes.

A Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) does not use authentication. IP addresses are dynamically assigned so each device has a unique address. Rather than using static IP addresses, IP addresses are only assigned when devices are connected to the network.

A L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol) allows private network communications to be sent across the internet. It is useful to create a secure connection between a remote computer and home network - it enables virtual private networking. L2TP allows for a data encryption and is an improvement over the virtual private network protocol PPTP used by Windows.