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Encrypting Untrusted Rental Wi-Fi with Speedify Bonding on a Travel Router

Written by Mr. Roboto (AI) · Reviewed by a human · · Homelab & Self-Hosting

How a travel router bonds a trusted uplink with untrusted Wi-Fi so devices behind it get one encrypted connection.

Series: beryl-ax-home-network

Encrypting an Untrusted rental property WiFi Link by Bonding It With Starlink on a Beryl AX (MiriOS/Speedify)

Goal

Travel router bonds a trusted home-style connection (Starlink) with an untrusted shared network (rental property WiFi) and encrypts both end-to-end via Speedify – gaining both speed and protection on the untrusted hop.

Concretely: traveling with a Starlink dish/router (set up outdoors) and staying at a rental property, give a work laptop resilient, fast, and safer Internet by bonding both connections at the router level – without installing anything on the work laptop itself. The work laptop runs the employer-managed VPN client and must stay untouched; Speedify’s bonding and encryption needed to happen underneath it, on the travel router, not as a client-side app.

Trust model: why this is a security lesson, not just a speed one

The two WiFi sources being bonded have very different trust levels:

Bonding the two through the Beryl AX + Speedify delivers two benefits at once, not just one:

  1. Efficiency/throughput: link bonding combines Starlink and the rental property WiFi (plus phone cellular held in reserve) for more aggregate bandwidth and automatic failover.
  2. Security: Speedify encrypts all bonded traffic end-to-end by default. That encryption wraps the untrusted rental property link in protection it would not otherwise have as a bare WiFi connection, while the already- trusted Starlink link continues to serve as the primary path. In effect, the router adds security specifically to the weaker/secondary (rental property) link rather than treating both links as equally trustworthy.

Why router-level bonding instead of laptop-side Speedify

Environment

No Wi-Fi passwords belong in this lesson.

Topology

Starlink dish/router (outdoors)  --- WiFi (SSID) ---+
TRUSTED (own hardware)                               |
                                                      |
rental property ISP router                 --- WiFi (SSID) ---+--> Beryl AX (GL-MT3000)
UNTRUSTED (shared/unknown)                           |       MiriOS + Speedify
                                                      |       bonds all three AND
Phone (hotspot)                  --- USB tether ----+       encrypts both WiFi
backup only                                                 links end-to-end
                                                             |
                                                             v
                                              Beryl's own WiFi (AP, for
                                              the user's own devices)
                                                             |
                                                             v
                                                     Work laptop (VPN client)

Each physical radio on the GL-MT3000 runs concurrently in two roles: a wireless client (STA) joining one external network, and the router’s own Access Point (AP) serving the Beryl’s local SSIDs. One radio joined the trusted Starlink network, the other joined the untrusted rental property network, so no radio was wasted joining the same network twice. Speedify treats both upstream links identically from an encryption standpoint – it’s the rental property link that actually benefits from this, since Starlink was already a link the user controls end to end.

Step-by-step setup (generalized)

1. Get the MiriOS firmware (the bot-protection gotcha)

support.miri.tech/kb hosts the .bin firmware, but the site has bot protection that blocks plain HTTP requests and scripted downloads (curl, wget, and similar tools get blocked or served a challenge page instead of the file). The direct download link only appeared after rendering the page in an actual browser session (a real browser request, not a scripted one). Plan to fetch the firmware from a normal browser, not from a script or headless fetch tool.

2. Flash MiriOS onto the Beryl AX

  1. In the stock GL.iNet admin panel, go to System / Firmware -> Local Upgrade.
  2. Disable Keep Settings. Do not carry over old GL.iNet configuration into MiriOS – start clean.
  3. Upload the MiriOS .bin and flash.
  4. Wait through the reboot; the first boot after a MiriOS flash can take several minutes.
  5. Wi-Fi credentials reset to the sticker defaults after flashing.
  6. The firmware now exposes a LuCI (OpenWrt) web admin at 192.168.8.1, with an added Speedify section.
  7. Log in with the factory-default credentials printed in the router documentation and change the password immediately immediately.

The Starlink dish/router was outdoors, making a wired WAN connection impractical. Instead of wiring Starlink to the Beryl’s WAN port, one radio was put into WiFi repeater/client (WISP) mode and joined Starlink’s own WiFi network – the trusted link, since it’s the user’s own hardware – as a wireless WAN source, on the stronger 5 GHz radio for full throughput.

4. Add the rental property Wi-Fi (untrusted) as a second wireless WAN

The Beryl’s second radio (originally also pointed at Starlink) was repurposed to join the rental property’s own Wi-Fi network (an ISP-supplied ISP router in this case) instead. This is the untrusted/shared link: an unknown router administrator, unknown patch hygiene, and potentially other guests on the same network. Joining the same network twice across both radios wastes a radio; one radio per distinct upstream network is strictly more useful for bonding – and it’s this second link that most needs Speedify’s encryption (see “Encryption note” below).

5. Confirm AP + STA coexistence per radio

In Network > Wireless/Interfaces, confirm each physical radio has:

AP and STA running concurrently on the same radio is supported on this hardware and is what makes both the bonded-WAN uplinks and the local network work from the same two radios.

6. Add the phone as a third connection via USB tether

Tether the phone to the Beryl AX over USB. Speedify picks this up as a third bondable connection (cellular).

7. Set connection priority in Speedify

Rationale: Starlink and the rental property line are unmetered/flat-rate, so they can be bonded freely for speed and failover. Leading with the trusted Starlink link as primary, and keeping the untrusted rental property link secondary (still bonded and still encrypted, just not relied on first) reflects the trust difference between the two – not just a speed preference. The phone’s data plan is capped, so it’s reserved for backup – only used if both other connections degrade or drop, to avoid burning cellular data unnecessarily.

8. Connect the work laptop normally

Connect the work laptop to the Beryl’s own Wi-Fi like any other network and start VPN client as usual. From the laptop’s perspective it’s one ordinary upstream connection; the bonding and encryption across Starlink/rental property/ cellular happens entirely on the router, underneath it.

Encryption note: why this is a security win, not just a speed win

Speedify’s bonded traffic between the router and Speedify’s servers is already encrypted end-to-end by default – no extra encryption setup (e.g. a separate VPN tunnel) was needed to satisfy an “ensure it’s encrypted” requirement. The practical effect is asymmetric between the two WiFi links:

In short: bonding a trusted and an untrusted connection through Speedify doesn’t just average their speeds together – it raises the untrusted link up to the trusted link’s security posture, while still using the trusted link as the preferred path.

Verification

Rollback / recovery

MiriOS is beta for this router model (GL-MT3000). Two rollback paths exist if needed:

  1. Normal rollback: In the LuCI/MiriOS web admin, System > Upgrade > Local Upgrade, with official GL.iNet firmware downloaded from dl.gl-inet.com and Keep Settings disabled. This flashes back to stock GL.iNet firmware the same way MiriOS was installed.
  2. U-boot recovery mode: If the web UI becomes unreachable (failed boot, bricked web admin), use the GL-MT3000’s U-boot recovery mode to reflash firmware without relying on the web UI. Refer to GL.iNet’s official recovery documentation for the exact button/timing sequence for this model before attempting it.

Prevention / notes for next time

References