My company is working on pocket-sized routers/firewalls/DNS servers.
These sit between the "smartphone" and the untrusted, e.g., public, wifi router, acting as a user-controlled gateway.
The user makes a one-time change to the settings on their smartphone to use the user-controlled gateway. This enables blocking ads and other unwanted outgoing connections without having to be physically at home or work, i.e. in a location where the user can "trust" the network.
The pocket-sized router runs open source software chosen and installed by the user. Users have a generous choice of operating systems, from Plan9 to BSD to Linux, as they do for the RPi. Baseband is either absent or physically disabled.
The main advantage I see to leveraging old "phones" for this is the power supply.
While I have seen small form factor routers made for travel, they are generally not rechargeable.
What is the company/product? I'm curious about an all-in-one solution as I already do this with an extra Mikrotik router and things like pi-hole or OpenDNS. Currently a mAP [0], but there are more inexpensive options.
The mAP is just what I have laying around, it's small and usually in my bag anyway. Plus, it has 2 ethernet ports so I can use it as a router/AP in a wired environment too.
To power it I use a microUSB cable to my laptop, or a phone charger, or a battery pack with the microUSB cable.
These sit between the "smartphone" and the untrusted, e.g., public, wifi router, acting as a user-controlled gateway.
The user makes a one-time change to the settings on their smartphone to use the user-controlled gateway. This enables blocking ads and other unwanted outgoing connections without having to be physically at home or work, i.e. in a location where the user can "trust" the network.
The pocket-sized router runs open source software chosen and installed by the user. Users have a generous choice of operating systems, from Plan9 to BSD to Linux, as they do for the RPi. Baseband is either absent or physically disabled.
The main advantage I see to leveraging old "phones" for this is the power supply.
While I have seen small form factor routers made for travel, they are generally not rechargeable.