Online Security for Travelers… Plus Unblocking Netflix!

As travel bloggers, so much of our lives revolve around being online. It has its pros and cons, but ultimately allows us to travel, build our business and live a life of freedom. It also means we’re always on the lookout for tech gadgets and tools that will make our life easier. So when AmpliFi contacted us about their new Teleport product, that will allow us to access our home internet and server, we were intrigued. When they told us we’d be able to connect to US Netflix overseas, we were sold!

Even for the tech-challenged (my name is Christine and I am technologically challenged), their product is easy to understand. It works like this: Say you’re in a foreign country and just want a quiet night in your hotel room to watch the new season of Stranger Things. Hey, no shame. You sign onto your Netflix account and whomp whomp, Netflix doesn’t run in the country you’re in! So now not only are you stuck watching TeleMundo 7, but you also run the risk of seeing spoilers.

Secure Internet Connecting While Traveling

Luckily, with the AmpliFi home router and new Teleport device you’re home free! The two products combined help provide a safe and easy way to access resources at home, even when you’re abroad. Using any Wi-Fi connection abroad, your Teleport creates an encrypted connection between you and your AmpliFi router at home, allowing you to access your home network wherever you go. When you’re abroad, simply plug in your Teleport device, connect with the AmpliFi router that you set up at home and you’re able to re-route to your home connection from the connection abroad. That means that your computer thinks you’re at home and you can load any site you’d normally be able to. Netflix travel movies binge, here you come!

Online Security for Travelers

But in all seriousness, AmpliFi boasts incredibly helpful features for anyone traveling abroad (not just TV junkies like us). Using a local WiFi network presents a variety of problems that AmpliFi aim to solve. Besides the frustration of not being able to watch your TV shows, you also run the risk of a security issue. Shared WiFi (even those that require a password) are prone to hackers. Anything like online banking, shopping or inputting private information is risky on a public WiFi network. Hackers are only getting smarter and more advanced unfortunately, so we have to be more diligent about keeping our information secure online.

You may be thinking that the AmpliFi Teleport product sounds like a VPN. And it’s definitely similar. A VPN (virtual private network) creates your own private network even if you’re using public WiFi. There are free ones and paid versions. Many people use them to download TV shows, so their internet provider can’t see it and bust ya for illegal downloading (or so I’ve heard…). It’s also common for people to try to use VPNs to watch programming that isn’t available in their country. Unfortunately, there’s a Netflix VPN block, meaning the guys and gals at Netflix have outsmarted most of the VPNs out there! 

The best Netflix VPN workaround is to connect to your home device. Another problem with VPNs are that they can often slow down whatever you’re working on and, even more nerve-wracking, track what you’re doing online. This isn’t the case with all VPNs, but some “watch” which sites you’re going on and some even sell that data to third parties. Creeeeeepy. Using AmpliFi to connect to your home WiFi is the easiest way to ensure your safety online.

To showcase all the great features, AmpliFi has asked us to participate in their AmpliFi Teleport Home Connect Travel Challenge. We’re challenged to test how many different ways we can connect to home while we travel. We’ll also be detailing how to install the product and what we’ve found it most useful for. For now, we just want to chat about what we’re expecting from the challenge.

The Challenge

Over the course of a week it’s our challenge to see how many different ways we can use the AmpliFi Teleport to make our lives easier online. Here are some of our ideas:

Watch TV! – Over the next week we plan to try out the Teleport by logging into all of our at-home TV networks. I know, I know, it’s gonna be a lot of work. But we’re willing to do it so we can give you guys a fair review of the product! You’re welcome 🙂

We’ll be trying out Netflix, Hulu, Xfinity (our at home cable provider) and HBOGo. All of those are restricted in Indonesia, with the exception of Netflix. Netflix was recently allowed here, but not with all the great shows and movies you get in the US. That’s why we need the Teleport to unblock Netflix US. We’ll see how the device works with streaming video, in terms of speed and quality.

Access files at home – Another great feature of the Teleport is that we can access all of the files on our home server. For non-tech geeks, it’s a bit like being able to use our desktop at home through our laptop abroad. We can access our documents, photos, videos, music and movies that we have at home. This will be super useful to us because we often need to access old photos and video to include in our blog posts. It would be great to be able to grab a movie that we forgot to put on our laptops. We’re not sure exactly how this works, so we’re looking forward to trying it out!

Banking security – Because of our travels and our remote business we do almost all of our banking online (also, who goes into a bank anymore?) We’ll admit, sometimes we’re not the most careful with where/how we log into our accounts. Hopefully using the Teleport will give us some peace of mind that all of our information is secure.

Aside from these main features, we’ll be looking at the ease of setting up and using the device. We’ll be on the lookout for any other uses that we didn’t anticipate and how other travelers might use the product. We’re very excited to try out the AmpliFi Teleport here in Bali and can’t wait to share with our readers!

This is a sponsored challenge between Don’t Forget To Move and the team at AmpliFi. As always, all thoughts and opinions are our own.