Review: Butterfly Traveler 2.0 USB Mini VPN Router

Have you ever found yourself traveling abroad to a country that likes to block certain websites from access within their borders? You tend to find this a lot in places like China since they like to control what their citizens have access to (for reasons we won’t discuss in order to not get political with this). When this happens, you may find that it is quite difficult to visit some of your favorite social networks when they are blocked. Thankfully, a workaround can be found using a VPN (virtual private network) solution that helps to encrypt everything you do so that the ISP you are connected to can’t tell which sites you are visiting. You are basically connecting to the VPN server, which is then passing those websites to you vs. visiting the websites directly. The ISP can only see your connection to a random server (one that it isn’t blocking).

Of course, unless you are already skilled at tracking down the right VPN solutions to connect to (assuming those websites aren’t blocked as well), it might be a little difficult to determine which ones are safe and which ones to stay away from (a lot of the free ones can be a little dangerous/questionable). To make things easier, there is the Butterfly Traveler 2.0 Mini VPN Router. It is a small device, around the same size as most of your popular thumb drives, that plugs right into an available USB port on your computer. After a little setup, it takes care of everything for you, and walla, you are hidden behind a VPN.

Once you plug it in and the LEDs slow down to a slow blink, you should be able to check your computer for available WiFi networks. Among them, you should see one that begins with “btfly-” and some numbers. Connect to that with “12345678” as the password. Then you would open a browser and visit “https://192.168.154.1” and it will take you to an internal setup page that will ask what the actual WiFi network you want to connect to is (hotel, coffee/tea house, restaurant, etc). Once you have accomplished this, the computer will still show as connected to the “btrfly-xxxxx” network, but you will have internet access through the actual network in the building. For the most part, you are ready to go.

Now you are hidden behind a VPN and can start browsing all of your favorite websites that were blocked before. If it doesn’t work at first, you would simply delete your browser’s cache and there shouldn’t be any other hoops to jump through.

We do recommend that you go back to the 192.168.154.1 internal page once you are connected, where it will take you to the main section where you can change the password for the btrfly-xxxxx network. This is highly important as if you don’t, anyone will be able to connect to it nearby as long as they know what it is and what the default password is (12345678). Change it to something personal to secure your connection with, and if you want, you can rename the network SSID it broadcasts as well (to change it away from btrfly-xxxxx).

You can also change the admin page password as well (you can never be too secure). Within the admin pages, you can view the network stats, see a list of all connected devices, choose which VPN mode you want active (Intelligent Mode, Full Mode or Tor), change the language everything is displayed in and more. There is also an option to disable ads that acts just like an ad blocker browser plugin would.

What makes this device pretty interesting, is that it functions as a router. This means, once you have it set up, you can connect other nearby devices like your phone, tablet, and more. All of the devices will ride on the same connection, hidden behind the VPN (this is why we change the default password). You can have a total of up to 10 devices connected to it at any given time.

In our testing of the device, we had blocked a number of websites like “test.com” on the network. This resulted in all devices connected to the network losing access to these websites. Upon setting up the Butterfly VPN, we were instantly able to access these websites again, despite the block at the network level. In fact, the user-friendliness of it all was pretty nice.

Of course, nothing is perfect. It doesn’t support networks with special characters or Chinese in the SSID or password. Worse, the password can’t even have any spaces (although the SSID can). This means you are limited to passwords only vs. passphrase configurations. This limits the security of the router you are connecting this router/VPN to since passphrases are much hard to crack than a simple password. However, if you have a plain English SSID and a one-word password with no special characters (ie, space/@/#/!/%/&, etc), you will be fine. Since the instructions say “currently” doesn’t support these variables, hopefully, a future firmware update will fix this.

That leads us to another stink we have with it. In the admin section, firmware updates require a manual flash using an uploaded field. There are no firmware/downloads/support links on the website (and the login link doesn’t seem to do anything), so it seems you will have to join their mailing list to get an idea of where these updates will come from.

Finally, your speed isn’t the best when connected to the Butterfly device. This is common with a lot of VPN solutions as your data is being bounced all over the place before it reaches your screen. Suddenly, the traceroute the information takes is much longer, which can cause delays (not to mention the speed of the website and the VPN server). As you can see in the graphic above, we were getting around 4.5Mbps downstream and 5.83Mbps upstream, on a WiFi connection that normally yields around 350Mbps+. It’s enough to visit most websites, but you won’t be streaming any 4K content.

Beyond those three things, the device seems to work quite well. With future firmware updates, it can only get better as they develop it further. This can prove to be a key item in your travel bag when visiting other countries around the world.

Also, once you have it set up to connect to a WiFi connection, it doesn’t have to be plugged into your computer. So if you need to free up a USB port or only need to use it for a tablet or phone, it can be plugged into a wall adapter or any other USB solution that supplies power.

Our Conclusion

This is a great VPN solution with a user-friendly approach to getting the customer going. You not only have a single device making use of it, but you can have up to 10 devices at a time all sharing its connection. It isn’t the fastest solution despite what they say on their website, but it does get the job done (at least the majority of users would see it that way). If you travel a lot to other countries, this seems like it would be a staple item to bring with you. It should only get better from here as they (hopefully) provide firmware updates in the future.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

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