6 ms·

With the depth of your experience, what's your prosumer recommendation? MikroTik?

sathackr 6y ago
Mikrotik has a great feature set and is mostly stable for the mainstream features. Where they really fall apart is wifi throughput. Most devices won't top 400mb/s. There is some hope on the horizon with v7 and the newest devices like Audience. Have seen reports of 1.3gb/s on these. But it's barely even beta right now. Ruckus is pretty solid and you can usually find them used for great prices. Many units have a stand alone firmware available that negates the need for a controller.
- jcpham2 6y ago
  We used to operate a satellite office whose primary internet service was Mikrotik directional AP’s bridged at both ends and this was maybe a half mile line of sight uplink. My testing even on gigabit chipsets mirrors your 400 mbit per AP comment, at least in my situation.
- anyfoo 6y ago
  Thank you. Do Ruckus support wireless downlinks? I can't lay cables here, so the switch in my home office needs to be fed by an access point.
  - croutonwagon 6y ago
    With unleashed they do. Its otherwise known as meshing pretty much anywhere else. https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-MeshOverview.html https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-MeshO... If you are talking long distances you need to start looking at directional antennas...But to say..span an A-Frame house...they would do fine as others as well.
    - anyfoo 6y ago
      It's just over two rooms and a hallway essentially, so should be fine. Thanks a lot! EDIT: The "Wireless Bridge Topology" is exactly what I need, here, but it's not entirely clear to me yet if I'd really need two APs on the gateway side as the picture suggests: https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-SupportedMeshTopologies.html https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-Suppo...
      - croutonwagon 6y ago
        You will need to have one AP wired (thats the root AP) and the next ones can be wireless connected/meshed. Note: regardless of the vendor Meshing will basically 1/2 your available wireless bandwidth. Its handy to extend coverage, and you will still be able to stream netflix and probably even things like facetime etc, but you are going to be essentially inducing a half-duplex connection into your "backbone".
croutonwagon 6y ago
for wireless AP's? It really depends. I actually just went with Wave2 stuff. In the end i bought some UAP-AC-HD's because 1. I am familiar/setup to handle their quirks and had 99% of the setup already done. 2. I really wanted an AP with Dual 5Ghz AND dual 2.4 Ghz dedicated antennas for some very specific applications (multiple rtsp streams over wifi+client plex wifi streams+client traffic. With the first two largely being on 2.4Ghz. 3. I am lazy (lots of this, my wife is less tolerant of me re-designing the wheel and being locked into an upgrade for days) 4. The security stuff i had mostly addressed anyway. If this were a greenfield purchase or I didn't really need/want dedicated radios. Id go with a ruckus. the r700 unleashed and/or r500 unleashed can be found cheap and are chock full of features. and 2x2:2 is normally going to be perfectly fine in a home setting. Going with ones that are "unleashed" mean that the controller runs on the AP's. not extra hardware needed. For most home uses. wave1 is still more than enough and their Wave1 AP's can be had cheap. Hell you can probably even get one of the R710/R510's in a very good price range and be at wave2. For switching...mikrotik is solid for cheap and works and stable. Even modems etc. For firewalls my preference is BSD, so something like opnsense...But mikrotik will probably do okay as well.
- karlshea 6y ago
  > Id go with a ruckus. the r700 unleashed and/or r500 unleashed This is the problem with Ubiquiti, and maybe why they feel they can advertise in their UI and let their quality slip: a new r710 lists for $1295. That's almost four times as much as a UAP-AC-HD. On sale for $810 it's still over twice as much. Some of the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 stuff can be had for $100-150. Like, yeah, I'm sure Ruckus is way better, but I'd hope so for the price difference.
  - kmlx 6y ago
    i have had very good experience with the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 products.
  - croutonwagon 6y ago
    You can get the r710 on Amazon for $430. R510 are even cheaper around 230 or so. These aren’t the latest iterations of their hardware. Ruckus doesn’t require a contract to get updates firmware/software. Theses are around the same prices as a uap-ac-hd. Regardless of list price. They can be had as cheap as ubiquiti and their software/firmware is not only better but doesn’t have all the telemetry crap built in.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Mikrotik has a great feature set and is mostly stable for the mainstream features. Where they really fall apart is wifi throughput. Most devices won't top 400mb/s. There is some hope on the horizon with v7 and the newest devices like Audience. Have seen reports of 1.3gb/s on these. But it's barely even beta right now. Ruckus is pretty solid and you can usually find them used for great prices. Many units have a stand alone firmware available that negates the need for a controller.

jcpham2 6y ago
We used to operate a satellite office whose primary internet service was Mikrotik directional AP’s bridged at both ends and this was maybe a half mile line of sight uplink. My testing even on gigabit chipsets mirrors your 400 mbit per AP comment, at least in my situation.
anyfoo 6y ago
Thank you. Do Ruckus support wireless downlinks? I can't lay cables here, so the switch in my home office needs to be fed by an access point.
- croutonwagon 6y ago
  With unleashed they do. Its otherwise known as meshing pretty much anywhere else. https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-MeshOverview.html https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-MeshO... If you are talking long distances you need to start looking at directional antennas...But to say..span an A-Frame house...they would do fine as others as well.
  - anyfoo 6y ago
    It's just over two rooms and a hallway essentially, so should be fine. Thanks a lot! EDIT: The "Wireless Bridge Topology" is exactly what I need, here, but it's not entirely clear to me yet if I'd really need two APs on the gateway side as the picture suggests: https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-SupportedMeshTopologies.html https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-Suppo...
    - croutonwagon 6y ago
      You will need to have one AP wired (thats the root AP) and the next ones can be wireless connected/meshed. Note: regardless of the vendor Meshing will basically 1/2 your available wireless bandwidth. Its handy to extend coverage, and you will still be able to stream netflix and probably even things like facetime etc, but you are going to be essentially inducing a half-duplex connection into your "backbone".

croutonwagon 6y ago

for wireless AP's? It really depends. I actually just went with Wave2 stuff. In the end i bought some UAP-AC-HD's because 1. I am familiar/setup to handle their quirks and had 99% of the setup already done. 2. I really wanted an AP with Dual 5Ghz AND dual 2.4 Ghz dedicated antennas for some very specific applications (multiple rtsp streams over wifi+client plex wifi streams+client traffic. With the first two largely being on 2.4Ghz. 3. I am lazy (lots of this, my wife is less tolerant of me re-designing the wheel and being locked into an upgrade for days) 4. The security stuff i had mostly addressed anyway. If this were a greenfield purchase or I didn't really need/want dedicated radios. Id go with a ruckus. the r700 unleashed and/or r500 unleashed can be found cheap and are chock full of features. and 2x2:2 is normally going to be perfectly fine in a home setting. Going with ones that are "unleashed" mean that the controller runs on the AP's. not extra hardware needed. For most home uses. wave1 is still more than enough and their Wave1 AP's can be had cheap. Hell you can probably even get one of the R710/R510's in a very good price range and be at wave2. For switching...mikrotik is solid for cheap and works and stable. Even modems etc. For firewalls my preference is BSD, so something like opnsense...But mikrotik will probably do okay as well.

karlshea 6y ago
> Id go with a ruckus. the r700 unleashed and/or r500 unleashed This is the problem with Ubiquiti, and maybe why they feel they can advertise in their UI and let their quality slip: a new r710 lists for $1295. That's almost four times as much as a UAP-AC-HD. On sale for $810 it's still over twice as much. Some of the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 stuff can be had for $100-150. Like, yeah, I'm sure Ruckus is way better, but I'd hope so for the price difference.
- kmlx 6y ago
  i have had very good experience with the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 products.
- croutonwagon 6y ago
  You can get the r710 on Amazon for $430. R510 are even cheaper around 230 or so. These aren’t the latest iterations of their hardware. Ruckus doesn’t require a contract to get updates firmware/software. Theses are around the same prices as a uap-ac-hd. Regardless of list price. They can be had as cheap as ubiquiti and their software/firmware is not only better but doesn’t have all the telemetry crap built in.

deleted 6y ago

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