Are you struggling to connect all your devices to your cruise ship's WiFi without breaking the bank? Well, I've found a savvy solution to keep you connected without the Ridiculous costs!
Introduction:
On a recent Alaskan cruise, the internet prices were astronomical—starting at $179 per device, per week! Between my wife, daughter, and myself, we typically juggle around 5 devices. That could have cost us a staggering $537 for a week’s worth of wifi connectivity on the cruise ship! Well this is where the flexibility of Gl Inet VPN travel router saved the day.
In this video, I'll show you how to use the GL.iNet VPN Travel Router to not only save money on your next cruise but also connect securely to any public WiFi network. Let's dive in.
Explanation of the Problem:
The way wifi works on most cruise ships is that crusie ships limit the number of devices connected to the internet using what is known as a captive portal making it difficult to share the internet access with more than one device at a time. A captive portal is essentially a gatekeeper device that makes you authenticate to the internet using a email address, room number, or personal information when you connect to the network. Some examples of networks that require a captive portal are the wifi networks at Starbucks, Hotels, Airports and of corse cruise ships. In a previous video, I demonstrated connecting to a captive portal using the GL inlet vpn travel router at hotel in Houston. Check out that video in the link above and also in the description notes below.
Technical Breakdown:
On this ship I had to enter my personal data in order to get my device authenticated to the “real internet.” On this cruise ships’s wifi, the captive portal gave me the option to remember a device so that the device would not have to authenticate again. The method the cruise ship’s wifi captive portal “remembered” a device was by recording the hardware address of the network adapter known as the Mac Address. If this is a new term for you, check out the free tech reference guide that is available to download the free preview of VPN essentials course. In the free course preview, I also explain the concept of the OSI model and how computers communicate on a network. You can find the course free preview and the tech reference guide at this link below.
Speaking of MAC addresses, I discovered while working with a Personal VPN clients a few months ago, that both Apple and Android devices implement a security feature by default known as “Private WiFi Addresses” or Randomized MAC address on Android devices. This security feature provides a simple layer of protection by keeping the real MAC Address of the device hidden from the network and other devices. Pro-Tip: This security feature must be disable in order to be able to use a VPN travel router on a crusie ship, hotel, or even the network at Starbucks. You will see the importance of disabling the Private MAC address security feature later in the video.
The Gl-inet series of VPN travel router offers lots of flexibility to connect the device to an Internet source, the two most popular options are physically connecting to another router with an ethernet cable or “repeating” the signal of a WiFi connection.
Once I authenticated my IPad to the cruise ships wifi captive portal and verified I had internet access it was now time to connect my VPN Travel router to the wifi network. The reason to connect the travel router to the cruise ships internet is so that I could connect multiple devices behind my router to allow sharing of internet connections with all the devices in my stateroom without additional expense.
One key feature of the Gl Inet series of VPN travel Routers is their ability tto “spoof” or clone the MAC address. This feature is handy because the travel routers do not have the ability to “Authenticate to directly to a captive portal.
The Mac Cloning capability of the Gl-Inet VPN Travel Router allowed me to copy the network information from my Ipad that had been previously authenticated to enable internet access on the cruise ship.
This feature is amazing but I need to give a disclaimer and say that it also requires a good bit of network knowledge to setup. In my experience, if you can use this feature consistently, you are using the Gl Inet VPN Travel router in Expert Mode.
Once I cloned the MAC address of the authenticated IPad device. I then needed to give it all the layer 3 network information such as the ip address, subnet mask, and gateway of authenticated Ipad. Once that information was entered correctly, the router then was put on the real network. As you can see in the video, once I connected the VPN travel Router to the internet, my router established connection to my personal VPN server in Atlanta and even though I was sailing the icy seas of Alaska, all of my devices connected to my travel router appeared to be in Atlanta.
I know this got real technical for a lot of people and most folks would simply prefer a step by step guide to setting this up. Well not to worry, I’ve created a step by step guide that you can download get setup in 10 easy steps to any captive portal blocked network. You can access the guide by clicking this link above or in the description notes below.
I hope this video helps you save a little coin on your next cruise.
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