What does an honest GL.iNet router review actually say about the Opal?

How the GL.iNet Opal actually secures your devices

Here's where your money actually goes. The Opal isn't really a wifi extender, it's a full Linux box, OpenWrt, the same firmware serious network people run on their home routers, squeezed into something that weighs about as much as a deck of cards. That distinction matters because of what OpenWrt lets you do: install a VPN client directly on the router itself, not on every device that connects to it. Normally, if you want WireGuard or OpenVPN protecting your traffic, you install an app on the laptop, another on the phone, another on the tablet, and log into all three separately every time you land somewhere new. The Opal moves that job downstream. You configure the VPN once, on the router, using whichever of the thirty plus supported services you already pay for, and every device that joins its wifi network is tunneled automatically. The router does the handshake, not you. That's also why it can plug into hotel ethernet or hop onto hotel wifi as a client and hand out its own clean, encrypted network on the other side; the three gigabit ports mean it'll do the same trick wired, at a desk, if you'd rather not touch wifi at all. The retractable antennas and the 145 gram body are the part everyone photographs, but they're not the feature. The feature is that VPN handshake happening once, quietly, instead of five times across five logins.