Hotel Gaming Wifi Extender

[RicKuRuKuS]

Any recommendations for a hotel wifi extension device such as a USB adapter? Mostly used for gaming on the road and get frustrated with the poor connections in some places. Currently have a decent wifi card installed in the laptop but looking to boost with some kind of extension device to get better coverage.

 

[Harvestor]

Most of the hotels I stay at have a ethernet jack in the room, i usually keep a cord in my bag.

On topic i have never gotten great results with any of the external antennas i have tested, never used anything super high end tho

 

[SamirD]

Most of the hotels I stay at have a ethernet jack in the room, i usually keep a cord in my bag.

Man you're lucky. I keep an ethernet cord in my kit too, but the ports are almost never live.

 

[sk3tch]

Any recommendations for a hotel wifi extension device such as a USB adapter? Mostly used for gaming on the road and get frustrated with the poor connections in some places. Currently have a decent wifi card installed in the laptop but looking to boost with some kind of extension device to get better coverage.

It's a tough problem to solve. For me, I just tether to my mobile phone when the hotel Wi-Fi sucks. Bear with me here - because competitive FPS actually performs pretty well via tethered cellular (LTE and 5G - depending). I was shocked myself.

Obviously, because of these risks - I pre-load my laptop before any trip. Power it up, install all the Windows and app updates, update all of my games, etc. - nothing worse than not being able to play your online game because they drop a 17GB update (Starbucks has pretty good networks when this happens - plus you can game there).

I try to stay in newer, remodeled hotels and that helps, too.

 

[RicKuRuKuS]

It's a tough problem to solve. For me, I just tether to my mobile phone when the hotel Wi-Fi sucks. Bear with me here - because competitive FPS actually performs pretty well via tethered cellular (LTE and 5G - depending). I was shocked myself.

Obviously, because of these risks - I pre-load my laptop before any trip. Power it up, install all the Windows and app updates, update all of my games, etc. - nothing worse than not being able to play your online game because they drop a 17GB update (Starbucks has pretty good networks when this happens - plus you can game there).

I try to stay in newer, remodeled hotels and that helps, too.

Yea do all this and often find myself doing phone tethering, just was looking to see if any other options... and yes the ethernet ports in nearly every hotel are never working. Ended up stopping bringing cords with me cause they never worked haha. Thanks for the tips fellow travelers and gamers!

 

[SamirD]

...and yes the ethernet ports in nearly every hotel are never working. Ended up stopping bringing cords with me cause they never worked haha.

One trick that used to work to find working ports was to see if a property had 'government rates'. There was a point in time where government employees had to use a wired connection vs wireless for security. But this may have just been the local market since there was a lot of DOD Army and security clearance work in the area.

 

[vxspiritxv]

Basically every laptop I had, I swap out the wifi adapter with latest intel chip. Rocking an AX210 currently.

But I keep a 'TP-Link AC600 USB WiFi Adapter' for when I need some range (which isn't often), has a big antenna and doesn't need drivers on win10/11. I also keep a ugreen adapter for ethernet too, same thing doesn't need drivers. Makes it easy to fix systems when you don't need drivers. Also doesn't hurt to do a check of the wifi signal when you get into the room, if it sucks ask to change rooms (doesn't hurt to ask).