VPN router - help needed?

Doltanian

I travel abroad quite often and usually end up staying in hotels or Airbnb apartments and some of these countries have ridiculous levels of censorship, this became a proper nuisance on a recent trip to the Middle East where many non objectionable websites were blocked and worse still my wifi-calling from EIR was also blocked.

What I'm wondering is can I buy a router or program my own here so that I could take with me, then connect into the LAN whilst abroad or connect it to a hotel wifi etc. and then connect my own devices to it and allow me to bypass all the blocks as my traffic would be routed via a VPN or proxy etc.

I found myself at a huge restriction particularly during a trip to the UAE recently where my wifi calling was blocked and Skype was throttled so badly as to be unusable. Whats App was also unusable most of the time and Viber outright blocked.

However losing my wifi calling was the biggest loss as I had planned to use that for calling Ireland which was very important to me as basically I can use my phone as if I'm at home as the voice and SMS traffic is routed over the wifi and once on wifi calling its just part of my package which is unlimited.

Squaredude

You could give tunnelbear a try. Its a vpn program that can be installed on pretty much any device and should remove any restrictions or censorship that you're encountering

ED E

China and Russia are outlawing VPNs entirely, so going there with such is risky.

In ME states you'll get away with it for now. Personally I'd setup a Linode box or similar and run my own, if you connect to a random IP vs one of a known VPN provider you're much less likely to be profiled as a tunneler.