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IMO both are obsolete especially if your connection is >50Mbps. If you must DIY use pfsense on a x86 machine with Intel NIC and low idle power draw. Otherwise u

IMO both are obsolete especially if your connection is >50Mbps. If you must DIY use pfsense on a x86 machine with Intel NIC and low idle power draw. Otherwise use Ubiquti Edgerouter or Microtik.

wtallis 8y ago
Ubiquiti is overpriced and Mikrotik is underpowered. There are good consumer routers that have 802.11ac for the price of a wired-only Ubiquiti router. If you're comfortable installing OpenWRT, it still offers more capabilities for a lower price than those "prosumer" brands that pretend to be real enterprise-grade stuff.
- frankzinger 8y ago
  Mikrotik is underpowered in what sense? Computing power or router features?
  - wtallis 8y ago
    Compute power, mostly. The hEX and RouterBoard products are mostly single-core MIPS processors in the 600-800MHz range, with a few using the dual-core 880MHz MIPS chip from Mediatek. You have to go all the way up to the $180 RB3011 to get a decent dual-core 1.4GHz ARM, or you could get that same CPU in a TP-Link router for $125 and also get dual-band WiFi (though admittedly, half as many Ethernet ports, but the second 5-port switch in the RB3011 certainly isn't worth the price difference).
- stephen_g 8y ago
  In my experience, a lot of the MikroTik hardware has been underpowered (struggling to get decent routing and IPSEC performance), so I’ll agree with you on that point. But I’ve found a lot of Ubiquiti hardware to be extremely high quality given how cheap it is. At my office, we installed seven new 802.11ac Ubiquiti access points for as much as it would have cost to add one more 802.11n to our Cisco system (apart from wanting 802.11ac, we also decided to decommission the Cisco because the controller would periodically crash every two months or so). To get the number of 10GbE interfaces and performance the EdgeRouter Infinity has (for $1600) in a Cisco would cost multiple times the price there too. I don’t know if I’d trust it for service-provider infrastructure, but we’ve replaced a lot of enterprise Cisco stuff in our office networks with Ubiquiti and only had a good experience.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    Pointing out that Ubiquiti equipment is cheaper than Cisco isn't saying much. With regards to the products that are actually relevant to this discussion—the stuff that's a reasonable alternative to typical consumer networking equipment—Ubiquiti definitely isn't the more affordable choice than the competition.
- awinder 8y ago
  I was at $150 a year ago for an edgemax router + one of the long-range access points (i added a second ap, but for comparison's sake, that was the cost for those 2 components), which gave me an open-source router os (vyos) out of the box. I'm not sure what the cheaper option is once figuring in your own time-cost to hack openwrt in, but it's hard to imagine it would be some dollar-sum that really deserves this much angst.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    > I'm not sure what the cheaper option is once figuring in your own time-cost to hack openwrt in, but it's hard to imagine it would be some dollar-sum that really deserves this much angst. WTF? Angst!? It takes minutes to install and configure OpenWRT on supported hardware. You upload the OpenWRT firmware like any manufacturer-provided firmware update, and after it's beeen flashed the router reboots into OpenWRT. The added time cost compared to learning and configuring any other router OS is negligible.

IMO both are obsolete especially if your connection is >50Mbps. If you must DIY use pfsense on a x86 machine with Intel NIC and low idle power draw. Otherwise use Ubiquti Edgerouter or Microtik.

wtallis 8y ago

Ubiquiti is overpriced and Mikrotik is underpowered. There are good consumer routers that have 802.11ac for the price of a wired-only Ubiquiti router. If you're comfortable installing OpenWRT, it still offers more capabilities for a lower price than those "prosumer" brands that pretend to be real enterprise-grade stuff.

frankzinger 8y ago
Mikrotik is underpowered in what sense? Computing power or router features?
- wtallis 8y ago
  Compute power, mostly. The hEX and RouterBoard products are mostly single-core MIPS processors in the 600-800MHz range, with a few using the dual-core 880MHz MIPS chip from Mediatek. You have to go all the way up to the $180 RB3011 to get a decent dual-core 1.4GHz ARM, or you could get that same CPU in a TP-Link router for $125 and also get dual-band WiFi (though admittedly, half as many Ethernet ports, but the second 5-port switch in the RB3011 certainly isn't worth the price difference).
stephen_g 8y ago
In my experience, a lot of the MikroTik hardware has been underpowered (struggling to get decent routing and IPSEC performance), so I’ll agree with you on that point. But I’ve found a lot of Ubiquiti hardware to be extremely high quality given how cheap it is. At my office, we installed seven new 802.11ac Ubiquiti access points for as much as it would have cost to add one more 802.11n to our Cisco system (apart from wanting 802.11ac, we also decided to decommission the Cisco because the controller would periodically crash every two months or so). To get the number of 10GbE interfaces and performance the EdgeRouter Infinity has (for $1600) in a Cisco would cost multiple times the price there too. I don’t know if I’d trust it for service-provider infrastructure, but we’ve replaced a lot of enterprise Cisco stuff in our office networks with Ubiquiti and only had a good experience.
- wtallis 8y ago
  Pointing out that Ubiquiti equipment is cheaper than Cisco isn't saying much. With regards to the products that are actually relevant to this discussion—the stuff that's a reasonable alternative to typical consumer networking equipment—Ubiquiti definitely isn't the more affordable choice than the competition.
awinder 8y ago
I was at $150 a year ago for an edgemax router + one of the long-range access points (i added a second ap, but for comparison's sake, that was the cost for those 2 components), which gave me an open-source router os (vyos) out of the box. I'm not sure what the cheaper option is once figuring in your own time-cost to hack openwrt in, but it's hard to imagine it would be some dollar-sum that really deserves this much angst.
- wtallis 8y ago
  > I'm not sure what the cheaper option is once figuring in your own time-cost to hack openwrt in, but it's hard to imagine it would be some dollar-sum that really deserves this much angst. WTF? Angst!? It takes minutes to install and configure OpenWRT on supported hardware. You upload the OpenWRT firmware like any manufacturer-provided firmware update, and after it's beeen flashed the router reboots into OpenWRT. The added time cost compared to learning and configuring any other router OS is negligible.