GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) Review (2026): The Best WiFi 6

Why you should trust this review

I bought this Beryl AX at retail. GL.iNet did not provide a unit, see the draft, or pay for placement. I travel around ninety nights a year for work, so this got tested the way a travel router actually gets used, across 14 hotel stays in seven countries, several flights with airline WiFi, and a few airport lounges, plus a long term home test as a guest network gateway.

I also ran it as my daily driver during a multi month stay in a serviced apartment with shared building WiFi, which is the closest thing to a real travel router stress test I can offer. Every figure below comes from my own use on real networks, not from a spec sheet.

How we evaluated

I logged uptime across nine months of intermittent travel use. I measured throughput with a standard network benchmark on hotel ethernet drops using several WiFi 6 client devices, and I tested WireGuard performance with both a commercial VPN provider and a self hosted server, logging throughput across a range of WAN bandwidths.

I tested captive portal compatibility across 14 hotel networks and several airport networks, since that is the feature most travel routers fail on. I also tested tethering from both an iPhone and an Android phone, and I ran an ad blocking package on it from day one to see how it held up over the long term.

Captive portal handling: the killer feature

This is the trick that separates the Beryl AX from cheaper travel routers. When you connect to a hotel network, the captive portal page appears in the Beryl’s own web interface as a single clickthrough on first connection. Once you accept the hotel’s terms once, every device connected to the Beryl is online, so you never re accept the terms on each phone, laptop, and tablet separately.

Across 14 hotel stays in seven countries this worked every single time. A few networks needed a one click MAC address clone toggle in the interface, but no hotel network defeated the router entirely. For anyone who has fought a hotel login page with three devices, this feature alone justifies the router.

WireGuard performance: the second killer feature

GL.iNet built hardware acceleration for WireGuard into the router’s chip, and it shows in the numbers. On a fast hotel ethernet drop, a commercial WireGuard tunnel sustained over 700 megabits across a sustained speed test run, which is the highest VPN throughput I have measured on any travel router. That means you can run an always on tunnel without it becoming the bottleneck on a good hotel connection.

The caveat is protocol. OpenVPN runs far slower on the same hardware, so if your provider supports WireGuard you should use it, and if it only offers OpenVPN you will see a fraction of that performance. For privacy minded travelers who can use WireGuard, the combination of speed and a pocket router that just works is genuinely rare.

WiFi, ports, and software

WiFi 6 throughput is more than enough for travel. A flagship phone hit strong speeds close in and held a usable link across a room, and the 2.4 GHz radio kept a clean link to low bandwidth devices further out. No hotel WAN I have used comes close to saturating it, so the WiFi 6 only design is a sensible cost choice rather than a real limitation on the road. The honest gaps are the lack of a 6 GHz radio for newer phones and only a single faster than gigabit port on the WAN side.

The software is OpenWRT done right. The custom interface handles the everyday jobs cleanly, tethering, WiFi as WAN, ethernet WAN, VPN, parental controls, and one click ad blocking, while the full advanced interface is one click away for custom packages and deeper configuration. The ad blocking package I installed ran for nine months without a hiccup, and the chassis is pocket sized and USB-C powered so it charges from any phone wall plug. The interface looks dated and iPhone tethering took a couple of tries the first time, but neither is a real problem in practice.

What makes the OpenWRT foundation matter is flexibility you cannot get from a sealed consumer router. I could install custom packages, set up network wide ad and tracker blocking, and tweak settings most travel routers never expose, all from a device that fits in a jacket pocket. The hardware acceleration that powers the fast VPN throughput is genuinely uncommon at this size, and pairing it with the captive portal handling means one small box solves the two problems that make hotel WiFi miserable. Over nine months across flights, lounges, and a long apartment stay on shared building WiFi, it never left me stranded offline, and that reliability on unfamiliar networks is exactly what you want from something you depend on while traveling. The dated interface is the only thing that ever made me wish for more polish, and it never once cost me a connection.

Who should buy the Beryl AX?

Buy it if you travel and want secure WiFi at hotels without re logging in on every device, if you run a WireGuard setup and want hardware acceleration, or if you appreciate OpenWRT under the hood for custom packages. It is ideal if you want a single small device that handles ethernet, phone tethering, and WiFi as WAN, all powered from your phone charger.

Skip it if you only stay home and never travel, since the captive portal and VPN strengths are wasted there. Skip it too if you specifically need WiFi 6E or 7, which no travel router at this price offers, or if you want a fully consumer friendly experience with zero configuration depth.

The verdict

The Beryl AX is the rare travel router I recommend with almost no caveats. After nine months and 14 hotel stays, its captive portal handling never failed me, its hardware accelerated WireGuard hit throughput no rival in its class matches, and the pocket form factor that shares my phone charger made it effortless to pack. The WiFi 6 only radio and the dated looking interface are the only real knocks, and neither matters much on the road. For frequent travelers who value secure, hassle free connectivity, this is the one to carry.