Ryoko Pro for someone who mostly stays in one country?

Fine as a backup if your home internet dies.

If your main goal is a backup for home internet, the roaming stuff is just a bonus you won’t touch much. Mine sits in a drawer until I need it and it’s been handy for that. You’re not really wasting anything since it still works as a normal hotspot.

Depends what you’re comparing it to. For a backup hotspot, the price might be hard to justify if you already have phone tethering sitting there unused. The roaming is irrelevant either way, but that doesn’t automatically make it the right pick.

I’d rather have a hotspot than rely on my phone.

The roaming angle is not the reason to buy it. I have one that I picked up mainly for work because I was going into buildings with terrible wifi, not because I was jetting around. It stayed in my bag for a couple months and then my home internet went down for almost a full day during a storm. I pulled it out, charged it, and it handled my laptop and a tablet fine. That changed how I thought about it. It was not about travel at all, it was just a second pipe when the main one died.

But I will say this. If your only reason is home backup, the math gets weird fast. The device itself is one cost, then you are paying for a data plan every month even if you barely use it. I kept mine because I also use it at job sites and once in a while on weekend trips, so it earns its keep. If I only wanted a home fallback, I would probably just use my phone hotspot and save the money. The roaming thing is not wasted in the sense that you are not paying extra for it, but it is also not a reason to buy. It is a feature you might never touch.

I don’t think it’s a waste, but I also wouldn’t buy one just for home backup. My power went out a few times last winter and I used mine to keep working, it did the job fine. But if your phone can already tether, that’s a much cheaper backup.

If you’re not traveling, the roaming thing is just dead weight you’re paying for. That’s my issue with it. I grabbed one a while back because my building’s internet kept dropping during the day and I figured a hotspot would be a simple fix. It wasn’t. The problem wasn’t the device, it was that my cell signal inside is garbage, so I basically traded one bad connection for another bad connection.

I ended up putting it near a window like everyone else does, and it worked better there, but then it’s not really “portable” anymore, it’s just a router with a worse battery. Which is fine if that’s what you want. But for pure home backup, you’re paying for a global roaming plan and hardware built for people moving between countries, and you’re using maybe 10 percent of what it does.

The honest comparison is that a cheap dedicated hotspot with a local SIM does the same job for backup purposes, and probably cheaper. The Ryoko makes sense if you actually cross borders and don’t want to deal with SIM swaps. If you’re sitting in one country 350 days a year, you’re buying travel insurance you’ll never claim.

That said, the setup is genuinely easy and mine hasn’t randomly died on me. It’s not junk. It’s just aimed at a different person than you’re describing.

Roaming is the main point, skip it if you don’t travel.

Then you’re paying for roaming you’ll never use.

It’s a hotspot, not a travel-only device.