TP-Link AC750 Wireless Portable Nano Travel Router (TL-WR902AC)

very compact.
easy set up.
works very well.

….verify that your ethernet port is active!!!

I am at an extended stay hotel and the wifi signal is very week at the end of the hallway where my room is. OK for texting and basic email, but my Roku took forever to connect and Netflix was a no-go. (Believe it or not, there are still hotels with “dumb” TVs.)

Since I’m going to be here for a month, I figured this would be a great purchase. I had it sent to a locker (super great feature BTW) and it arrived next day no problem.

Super easy instructions…. got it all ready to go….. and…. nothing. No signal. Nothing.

Restarted everything, did all the trouble shooting….nothing.

Finally called the front desk. They had no idea what I was talking about. Tried to sell me on the $4.95 per day enhanced wifi.

They agreed to send engineering up….. guy takes one look… “Oh, I don’t think any of those wall things work anymore. Well I’m not sure.”

So my next idea was to test in a different room…. he radios to the desk and we walk down the hall to an empty room. Take the router and my tablet with me…… plug in…. two clicks…. PRESTO !!!! works like a charm.

So I arrange to switch rooms and all is good. Super strong full signal and running tablets and Roku no problem. Phones all connected as well. Super tiny and will always be in my travel bag from now on.

Great product.

I travel for work. So I am in hotels often.

I LOVE the ability to plug a gadget in, and point it to the access point, and have all my devices automatically connect up. This was necessary to satisfy the problem of Google chromecast, where it requires a phone to operate, and they must be on the same wifi network. (Most hotels isolate devices to keep guests secure from each other)

I bought the small nano first. And I later purchased the larger version (TL-WR902AC). So I will provide the pros and cons of each here.

Please also note that I am EXCLUSIVELY using this in hotels in wi-fi only (never plugged in the RJ-45 ethernet) as a wi-fi access point for all my tech, I’ve not used it for anything else. There are many other features and capabilities that are not accounted for here.

Nano:
+ simple setup, great wizard.
+ SOOOOO tiny
+ Works great with Marriott/SPG hotels (and everywhere else I’ve tried it)
– Struggles with multiple devices, the single band antenna seems to be a big restriction in speed and multiple devices.
– Slow speeds

Big brother (AC902 model)
+ Much cleaner and more stable connections – handles all my devices brilliantly.
+ Far more features (that I don’t use)
+ Larger than the nano (picture for reference) but still so small that it’s perfect for travel
– Setup is not so streamlined. Additional hardware toggle on the device makes it more confusing. (I use the middle setting, “Share Hotspot”)

Side-notes:
I used this exclusively at a single hotel before upgrading, so the differences noticed between the two models were all at the same property.

Both devices get a bit warm, but nothing concerning, and it’s not at all surprising given how tightly they are packing them.

Both are small enough that the only reason I would recommend the nano over the big brother is if you need something to fit in your pocket, or purse, and don’t have high expectations in terms of speed.

What a piece of junk. I bought this because I wanted a media server for my VR headset. There is a USB port for this exact purpose. First, you need to know that this reviewer is a computer guy of 40+ years. Setup was a bit difficult, but after an hour it was up and running. After a week, the nightmare began… Fail#1: One evening, I went to watch a movie and EVERYTHING was gone — all 300GBs just vanished into thin air. The drive had been wiped out. After days of data recovery attempts, I recovered a small portion of the content. Fail#2: I decided to use my expensive USB SSD to store the media. All went well for a few days …until I wanted to add some more movies to the SSD. After removing it from the router, it would no longer work properly on the laptop. I could only move about 1.5GB at a time before it would lock-up the SSD. After several hours of messing with the destroyed SSD, I gave up on it. Fail #3: I had an old 300GB USB HDD that I filled completely with content. And guess what? The router wouldn’t locate the movie folders on the USB HDD drive. After wasting even more time, I guessed that it might have failed to locate my data because there was a small 9GB empty non-active partition on the drive in addition to the main partition. What a dumb limitation. Arrg! Windows had no issue recognizing this USB HDD drive, but the router could not. So now I’m sitting here writing this review while I’m reformatting and reloading the entire 300GB of data on the third drive yet again. If this router eats this third drive, I will update this review. The lessons I learned are that you should NEVER connect non-backed-up data to this router, and never connect an expensive SSD drive to this router. I honestly wish I had never purchased it.

UPDATE: My 300GB drive is going to be too small for future use, so I purchased a new 2TD USB HDD. I formatted it and loaded the 300GB of data, and the router did NOT see the data. Really!!?? After some more experimentation, I decided to reformat the USB HDD with the 4096 format allocation unit size (which is crazy inefficient for large media files), and the router DID find the files! So, I writing this update while yeat again moving the same 300GB of data yet another time! To save YOU some time, here a quick tip: **Do NOT format any USB drive with any other allocation unit size than 4096 if you expected this router to be able to see the data. Or at least, format your drive with a test folder to see if this router can see it before dedicating all the time to load the content. ** Here’s hoping this is the final saga in this sad story.

(not so) FINAL UPDATE: Well, everything was great – was able to watch some movies!! ….until this morning, when the media server “just quit” in mid-movie. The WiFi bridge was still working just fine, but the media server magically disappeared. So, I was faced with the difficult decision of either returning the router to Amazon or experiencing the massive joy of taking a sledgehammer to it. But alas, I took the responsible route and am returning it to Amazon. After all that has happened, I didn’t want it to damage my sledgehammer also! In all fairness, if you don’t need a media server, and NEVER intend to connect any USB drive, you should be very happy with this product — the Wifi was rock-solid.

(another no so) FINAL UPDATE: Well, I THOUGHT the media server “just quit”, but actually after moving the USB drive back to the computer I realized that this absolute POS router killed a BRAND NEW $70 USB DRIVE at the hardware level. It no longer spins up. Arrrg! It just gets worse…

THE FINAL UPDATE! The nightmare is over! Just received my RavPower (ironically, the same exact model number, scary, aye?) and got everything set up and running as a bridge and media server in under 10 minutes! Super happy again!