4 ms·

For the rest of us with budgets of less than a month's rent, I'd recommend Mikrotik. Just as reliable as an Ubiquiti (as in, never needs a reboot), yet is stil

For the rest of us with budgets of less than a month's rent, I'd recommend Mikrotik. Just as reliable as an Ubiquiti (as in, never needs a reboot), yet is still a single box you can set in the corner and forget about if you wish. Or set up a mesh of their $20 units to blanket your three-story house if you're so lucky. (Nothing against Ubiquiti which I'm sure is great, but I've been a very happy Mikrotik user for years. Recently updated my main AP to their gigabit (wired and wireless) hAP AC and loving it. I use a second Mikrotik as a fully-bridged repeater, and have an IoT wired+wirless virtual network firewalled off from the rest.)

tjohns 10y ago
The two also play very well together, since they're all single-purpose devices. I use a Mikrotik RB2011 (non-WiFi) router for Internet connectivity, and Unifi APs spread throughout the house for wireless. I've had nothing but good things to say about the setup.
fencepost 10y ago
The problem with the Mikrotik stuff (speaking as one who uses it) is a level of user friendliness that makes Cisco IOS command line interfaces seem like a good idea. It's possible to do some amazing things. It's also possible to screw up trying to do amazing things (use safe mode for automatic rollback in case your changes lock you out).
lobster_johnson 10y ago
I have a Mikrotik HAP AClite. It's a great OS, I love the techy admin and shell access; it's great as a router, and rock solid (haven't needed to reboot it since I bought it last year). But as much as I admire it, I can't recommend it as a wifi access point. It doesn't have an external antenna, and its performance compared to consumer routers is pretty mediocre. I have it running in my office, and in my living room (5m away, only a single wall between them) my AppleTV and Xbox One would continually drop out. Installed my old Asus RT-N56U as an access point connected to the Mikrotik via Ethernet, and haven't had an issue since. Admittedly, I never tried fiddling with it to see if different channels or settings might work better.
- pilsetnieks 10y ago
  If you haven't even tried different wifi channels, it's not a valid critique, is it? Especially for such a complicated device that doesn't do any handholding for you. You wouldn't expect to buy a Cisco box, for example, plop it down and automagically do everything without serious time invested in configuring it.
- colanderman 10y ago
  I agree the consumer models tend to be underpowered. My first Mikrotik was the RB951-2n, which maxed out at 15 dBm (32 mW) and dropped to 9 dBm (8 mW) at max speed (150 Mbps). The hAP ac lite you own is thankfully around ~6 dBm more powerful, but that's still a little weak for thick walls. I've since upgraded to the hAP ac, which ranges from 29 dBm (800 mW) down to 25 dBm (320 mW). That extra ~15 dBm does make a huge difference penetrating walls. (The RB951*-2HnD models are similarly high-powered if you only care about 2.4 GHz.) A couple tricks I've used to increase link reliability through walls are to disable short guard interval (to protect better against reflections), and to disable higher bitrates (to avoid excessive failed retries). Those have made my WDS link through 4 walls pretty stable.
alkonaut 10y ago
Have I just been lucky that never need to reboot my consumer gear? I run a normal N600 (Wndr3400) netgear thing that has quite heavy load, and it basically only stops during the annual blackout... I wish I had sketchy consumer gear so I could feel good about upgrading to this prosumer stuff, but that N600 just blankets my 2 storey house with wireless with ease, and never fails it seems :/ First world problems.
- shoover 10y ago
  Same here. AT&T's 2wire residential gateway worked great for me for 5+ years until the wifi could no longer get the job done from upstairs in one corner of the house to the xbox downstairs in the other corner. I added a more powerful WNDR3700 in the same spot and was back in business.
teilo 10y ago
My standard implementation for SMB is Mikrotik + Ubiquiti Unifi. The Mikrotik product line is comprehensive, from the smallest low-to-medium bandwidth solution (various MIPS-based routers) to high-performance multi-1G (Tile cell chips in their CCR line). It's amazing what you can accomplish with a $100 router: VLAN, every VPN tunneling method you can name (and some you can't), MPLS, BGP. I use them as remote office VPN tunnel routers, set them up for L2TP so I can do remote support, use packet mangling/traffic shaping for VOIP. All this on a $100 router.

tjohns 10y ago

The two also play very well together, since they're all single-purpose devices. I use a Mikrotik RB2011 (non-WiFi) router for Internet connectivity, and Unifi APs spread throughout the house for wireless. I've had nothing but good things to say about the setup.

fencepost 10y ago

The problem with the Mikrotik stuff (speaking as one who uses it) is a level of user friendliness that makes Cisco IOS command line interfaces seem like a good idea. It's possible to do some amazing things. It's also possible to screw up trying to do amazing things (use safe mode for automatic rollback in case your changes lock you out).

lobster_johnson 10y ago

I have a Mikrotik HAP AClite. It's a great OS, I love the techy admin and shell access; it's great as a router, and rock solid (haven't needed to reboot it since I bought it last year). But as much as I admire it, I can't recommend it as a wifi access point. It doesn't have an external antenna, and its performance compared to consumer routers is pretty mediocre. I have it running in my office, and in my living room (5m away, only a single wall between them) my AppleTV and Xbox One would continually drop out. Installed my old Asus RT-N56U as an access point connected to the Mikrotik via Ethernet, and haven't had an issue since. Admittedly, I never tried fiddling with it to see if different channels or settings might work better.

pilsetnieks 10y ago
If you haven't even tried different wifi channels, it's not a valid critique, is it? Especially for such a complicated device that doesn't do any handholding for you. You wouldn't expect to buy a Cisco box, for example, plop it down and automagically do everything without serious time invested in configuring it.
colanderman 10y ago
I agree the consumer models tend to be underpowered. My first Mikrotik was the RB951-2n, which maxed out at 15 dBm (32 mW) and dropped to 9 dBm (8 mW) at max speed (150 Mbps). The hAP ac lite you own is thankfully around ~6 dBm more powerful, but that's still a little weak for thick walls. I've since upgraded to the hAP ac, which ranges from 29 dBm (800 mW) down to 25 dBm (320 mW). That extra ~15 dBm does make a huge difference penetrating walls. (The RB951*-2HnD models are similarly high-powered if you only care about 2.4 GHz.) A couple tricks I've used to increase link reliability through walls are to disable short guard interval (to protect better against reflections), and to disable higher bitrates (to avoid excessive failed retries). Those have made my WDS link through 4 walls pretty stable.

alkonaut 10y ago

Have I just been lucky that never need to reboot my consumer gear? I run a normal N600 (Wndr3400) netgear thing that has quite heavy load, and it basically only stops during the annual blackout... I wish I had sketchy consumer gear so I could feel good about upgrading to this prosumer stuff, but that N600 just blankets my 2 storey house with wireless with ease, and never fails it seems :/ First world problems.

shoover 10y ago
Same here. AT&T's 2wire residential gateway worked great for me for 5+ years until the wifi could no longer get the job done from upstairs in one corner of the house to the xbox downstairs in the other corner. I added a more powerful WNDR3700 in the same spot and was back in business.

teilo 10y ago

My standard implementation for SMB is Mikrotik + Ubiquiti Unifi. The Mikrotik product line is comprehensive, from the smallest low-to-medium bandwidth solution (various MIPS-based routers) to high-performance multi-1G (Tile cell chips in their CCR line). It's amazing what you can accomplish with a $100 router: VLAN, every VPN tunneling method you can name (and some you can't), MPLS, BGP. I use them as remote office VPN tunnel routers, set them up for L2TP so I can do remote support, use packet mangling/traffic shaping for VOIP. All this on a $100 router.