I just got back from seven days in Tbilisi. Holiday, mostly, with a couple of days of work prep wedged in before things ramped up.
The setup came with me. Not as a test. I take it on every trip now and don't think about it. Over those seven days I ran four devices across three independent tunnels home. The whole thing held up without drama. The only surprise had nothing to do with the connection. I didn't spot it until I checked my phone bill.
Here's how each piece behaved in the wild. What worked, what slowed down, and where you should pay attention if you're packing your own.
What was in the bag
A GL.iNet Slate AX travel router. Not custom built. Just configured once on my desk months ago, with a WireGuard profile pointing at my home mini PC. Ethernet WAN only. No wifi repeater mode. Wifi-to-wifi adds another link to the chain, and more links means more places for things to drift. Plug in once, done.
Four devices total, in two groups.
Personal kit, travels with me. The personal MacBook and personal iPhone, each with its own WireGuard profile pointing at the home server. I built those profiles at home weeks ago, on my own network, where I could verify they actually worked before flying. Both auto-connect. Both tunnel direct to the home server regardless of what wifi or cellular they happen to be on.
Work kit, stays at the Airbnb. The work laptop has its own corporate VPN apps (Zscaler and friends) but no commercial VPN client like NordVPN, and IT wouldn't approve one if I asked. Plugged into the Slate AX over ethernet, it inherits the WireGuard tunnel back to home without knowing any better. The corporate VPN apps keep doing their thing on top of that. The spare iPhone holds the 2FA codes for the work laptop login. Airplane mode on, location off, Bluetooth off, plugged into the Slate AX over a lightning-to-ethernet adapter. No wireless radios, no incidental signals, just ethernet to the Slate. Both work devices stayed plugged in 24/7 in the Airbnb.
Plus the relevant adapters and other hardware. Cables, plugs, extension leads.
Before I flew I bought a Magti eSIM through the MyMagti app. 10 GEL of data for the week. That's about £2.74. (Hold that number. It comes back later.) Ordering before flying meant I landed already connected. No SIM-finding mission at the airport, no carrier upsell, no hunting for a kiosk. And if the Airbnb internet ever drops, the Slate AX can use the iPhone's hotspot as its WAN. Whole rig stays online.
That's the entire kit.
The first 30 minutes in Tbilisi
The Airbnb had ethernet at the workstation desk. Good. I plugged the Slate AX in. WAN LED solid green inside ten seconds, WireGuard handshake completed shortly after. That's the moment the tunnel is live.
I plugged the personal MacBook into the Slate AX first. The personal MacBook is the device I trust to debug. Verify the tunnel works on the kit you control before plugging in the kit you don't.
Then I ran the checks. Always the same checks, every trip:
- Opened whatismyip.com. The IP shown was my UK home IP, the same one that resolves my home DuckDNS subdomain. Not a Georgian IP, not a datacenter IP.
- Opened dnsleaktest.com. DNS resolution was being handled inside the tunnel, on my home network's resolver. Not Magti's, not the Airbnb's, not Cloudflare's. DNS leaks are how a "VPN connection" silently betrays you. Worth checking every time.
- Pinged my home server through the tunnel. About 80ms, which is what I'd expect from this distance.
- Loaded BBC iPlayer to confirm geolocation. It loaded clean, no error, no "this content isn't available in your region."
- Ran a speedtest through the tunnel. 36.49 down / 38.48 up. My home baseline before flying was 46.62 / 48 with the tunnel off. About 80% of home throughput across 4,000 km. Plenty for streaming, calls, and everything I'd actually need.
Five minutes, five checks, all green. Then I swapped the MacBook out for the work laptop, ethernet adapter and all, and plugged the spare iPhone into the Slate AX over its own lightning adapter for 2FA. Then I unpacked.
Three independent paths home
Three independent tunnels back to my home server across seven days, and each one had a different job. Personal kit travelled with me on its own tunnels. Work kit stayed at the Airbnb on the Slate AX. That's the structural pattern of the trip.
Path one: personal MacBook on its own WG profile. Cafés, day trips, anywhere I went with the MacBook outside the Airbnb. Brought its tunnel with it. Streaming, SSH, personal projects, all routed straight to the home server.
Path two: personal iPhone over Magti cellular. Same setup, different network. The iPhone had its own WireGuard profile auto-connecting to the same home server. I streamed entire episodes of Race Across the World on iPlayer over cellular on the long marshrutka rides out of Tbilisi. No buffering, no quality drop, no region error. That surprised me more than any of the indoor tests.
Path three: Slate AX router-level tunnel, carrying the work kit. The work laptop and spare iPhone never left the Airbnb. Both on ethernet into the Slate, both inheriting the same tunnel, both on a UK home IP. The Slate AX did the work. The devices didn't have to know.
Three tunnels, four devices, one home server. None of it required me to do anything once I'd plugged the router in on day one.
The work laptop test
This is the part I cared most about.
The work laptop has corporate SSO, work apps, IT policies. No commercial VPN client is installed on it, and IT wouldn't approve one if I asked. That's the situation most remote workers are actually in. It's also why I verified the tunnel on the personal MacBook first. The work laptop is the device I least wanted to be debugging at the Airbnb desk.
When the work laptop went onto the Slate AX, the tunnel was already up. The laptop didn't see a VPN. It saw a normal ethernet connection, on a normal-looking residential network, with a normal UK IP address. From the laptop's perspective, and from the perspective of any IT system watching it, I was sat at home.
I tested the lot:
- Logged into corporate SSO. The spare iPhone on the Slate AX handed me the 2FA code. No challenge, no "unusual location" email, no MFA escalation beyond the normal one.
- Work VPN applications like Zscaler still worked on top, no conflict. Corporate apps reached corporate networks the same way they always do.
- Loaded Slack and Teams. Status went green. Calls worked, audio was clean.
- Pulled work files off the corporate file share. Same speed as home, give or take.
- I'd manually set the laptop time zone to UK before flying, and turned location services off. Two clicks. The laptop's view of the world was UK, regardless of where I happened to be sitting.
Nothing about the laptop's behaviour suggested it was anywhere other than my UK home. That's the differentiator from a NordVPN-style service. Commercial VPN ranges are well known. Corporate firewalls and SaaS providers flag connections from those ranges. A residential home IP doesn't trip those flags, because it isn't a flag in the first place.
iPlayer, Race Across the World, and the lifestyle stuff
Outside of work hours the same setup did everything else.
I caught up on Race Across the World on BBC iPlayer through the personal MacBook. No region error, no buffering loops, no commercial VPN being silently throttled. Just the show, in the evening, in the Airbnb, identical to streaming it from the sofa at home.
The same show streamed cleanly on the personal iPhone over Magti cellular during the long marshrutka rides out of Tbilisi. Different device, different connection path, same UK home IP, same iPlayer experience. Streaming UK content on a Georgian cellular network in the back of a marshrutka still feels slightly miraculous to me.
UK banking apps on the personal iPhone worked. I'll be honest: the banking app loaded slower than at home. Maybe 5 to 10 seconds extra to open. But it loaded. The transaction I needed to make went through. No "unusual sign-in" challenge, no card-block, no support call to my bank explaining I was abroad. The bank's view of me was the same as if I'd been on my home wifi in the UK.
I SSH'd into the home mini PC most evenings on the personal MacBook to keep some personal projects ticking over. Streamed films off Jellyfin running on the home mini PC itself. The home mini PC isn't just a VPN endpoint, it's a real home server. Nothing fancy, just the kind of thing I'd do at home. The tunnel made all of it trivial.
The pattern across all of this is the same one. The setup doesn't know what kind of traffic is going through it. Work, streaming, banking, SSH. It's all just packets going to and from a UK home address. The remote services see what they always see.
The thing I didn't expect
Now the £2.74.
I bought 10 GEL of data on the Magti eSIM before flying. That covered seven days of personal browsing, calls, maps, music, banking, and the personal iPhone's always-on tunnel back to the UK. About £2.74, all in.
If I'd left the iPhone on EE roaming instead, that would have been around £6 per day. Seven days. £42.
The HomeWire setup paid for itself before BBC iPlayer ever loaded. Before any of the streaming, the work-laptop tunnel, the banking, the SSH. The setup paid back in roaming charges I didn't pay.
The number genuinely surprised me. I went into the trip thinking of HomeWire as the streaming-and-banking layer. I came back realising the eSIM-plus-tunnel combination is its own value. You're not just bypassing geo-blocks. You're bypassing the carriers.
Bottom line
Seven days, four devices, three tunnels home, zero incidents. Nothing to debug, nothing to fix, no panic moments.
The Slate AX is a travel router off the shelf. One up-front hardware cost. I configured it once, months ago, on my desk. I haven't touched it since. It travels in a small bag, plugs into whatever's in front of it, and disappears into the background.
That's what good infrastructure looks like. Boring on purpose. A setup you don't have to think about is a setup that earns its keep on every trip, not just the dramatic ones.
If you're working from abroad, a residential home IP gets you through corporate firewalls. A datacenter IP gets you flagged. If you're just travelling and want UK iPlayer in the evening, the answer is the same setup. It doesn't care which one you are. It does the same thing either way.
I'd take it on every trip. I do, in fact. That's the point.