Tired of battery drain? Here’s why I switched from phone hotspots to a travel router

I generally avoid hotel, shopping mall, and airport Wi-Fi. This is down to security and privacy reasons. Some public Wi-Fi providers require you to sign up for an account to use their network, and there’s the risk of data snooping.

As a result, I always use a mobile data connection when I’m out of the house. For quick outings, I’ll use my phone as a hotspot. But when I’m going to be out for a few hours, or I’m leaving for an overnight trip, I always use a mobile router instead.

For years, I used my mobile router whenever I needed to connect any additional devices to the internet while I was out of the house. I had a 160GB plan on the SIM card inside the router, so this meant that I could easily use its connection without worrying about running out of data.

However, I canceled this plan last year to save money. I wasn’t going on work trips as often, and the scheduled power outages my region had been experiencing were no longer as consistent. I still have the SIM, but only load it up with data when needed.

As a result, I experimented with using my phone as a hotspot more often. This was mostly for trips to the shop, specifically because I’ve started playing Pokémon Go again and use a SIM-less second device for my alt account.

That’s when I noticed the major downside to using my phone as a mobile hotspot: its effect on battery power. I had always assumed a hotspot uses some power, but using it consistently while playing a game made me realize how stark the effect can be. My phone can handle several hours in Pokémon Go, but when acting as a mobile hotspot, its battery life drains noticeably quicker.

There are other quirks too. My phone heats up a lot more than if I were simply just running Pokémon Go. There were also occasional issues with internet connectivity, with apps taking some time to refresh their data.

But even when I’m not playing games on my phone, battery life has always been a major reason why I don’t like using my phone as a hotspot. It works well in a pinch, but I need my phone to do other things. When I’m at a tech event, I’m taking photos, posting on social media, uploading videos, and looking up information on the products being announced. These events last hours, and when I travel from Cape Town to Johannesburg, I get limited time at the hotel to get ready.

This often means I can go most of the day without having an opportunity to charge my phone, and it needs to last a full day of heavy use, as well as ordering an Uber to the airport. Thankfully, my phone has a 6,000mAh battery, which makes things considerably easier. Obviously, not everyone’s phone battery is quite that substantial.

Overall, I want my phone to be free to do other things. I always have a power bank when I travel, but I only want to use it when really needed in case my flight is delayed or I run into other issues.

If you have a decent mobile router, it will have a good battery while also being able to provide a data connection to multiple devices. In my case, my router has a 6,400mAh battery. This means that it usually lasts around 24 hours when I leave it on constantly and connect multiple devices, including two phones and a laptop.

It’s also pretty portable, much smaller than a smartphone, but about twice as thick. I can easily fit it in my bag, along with my keys, wallet, and phones. Carrying it around is not difficult, but it provides a major boost in terms of not draining my phone’s battery by using it as a hotspot. If my phone runs low on power while I’m out, I can also use the router as a power bank thanks to its extra ports.

This weekend, I actually went to a Pokémon Go community event. The event lasted three hours, which meant that I’d be using two phones for this amount of time (and possibly longer). Considering just going to the shops and driving around the block while using my phone as a hotspot and running Pokémon Go drains a significant amount of battery, I decided to take my mobile router.

This turned out to be the right choice. At one point, I accidentally turned my phone’s brightness to full while outside and only realized about 30 minutes later after it had taken a chunk of my battery power. I brought a power bank just in case, which got me through the last 30 minutes of the event by keeping my phone stable at 15%. If I had used my phone as a hotspot, though, it would have likely died before the end.

While my phone did get noticeably warmer during the event, it didn’t get nearly as hot as when I use it as a hotspot. Since heat degrades a phone’s battery, I prefer to keep it at a lower temperature, so this was an added bonus of using the router.

But even during a recent internet outage at home, my router was still the preferred option to using my phone as a hotspot. My router tends to handle multiple connections better than my phone, and I wanted to stream videos on my laptop.

Both devices use a 4G connection. While I find that my phone’s connection is faster when it’s the only device accessing its own data connection, it slows down significantly when more devices are connected. The router, while slower in general, is more consistent when multiple devices are connected.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say you shouldn’t use your phone as a mobile hotspot. There are plenty of times it comes in handy. In fact, when traveling in Ireland in 2024, my dad’s phone acted as a hotspot whenever we left our accommodation. This meant that we didn’t have to buy multiple travel SIM cards, and he could still receive calls from my brother if needed.

However, my dad hardly uses his phone. I handled all the navigation on my own handset when the rental car’s navigation didn’t work. We also mostly used the data connection for WhatsApp, Google Maps, or quick Google searches — nothing too intensive.

So in this case, using a phone as a hotspot worked well. But if you want to connect multiple devices while still using your phone heavily, I would say that a quality mobile router is the better way to go.