Hello everyone,

I'm new to mikrotik and I would really like to use it's hardware and software for a project that I'm working on. I need a managed switch that has two wan ports with load balancing abilities and a few (up to four) ethernet ports whose bandwidth I will be able to set manually. Another welcome feature would be application control and blocking. Can you please tell me what the most cost effective solution would be and I mean which hardware device and what level of a licence would I need to get the most of it?

THank you in advance.

Do you mean a router or a switch? I'm assuming router.

It's hard to give you any device recommendation with as little information as you posted. The license level is determined by the features you need. If all you need is static routing across 1-4 WAN circuits, some basic QoS, and a basic firewall, a level 4 license will suffice. The device type itself is determined by how many packets per second you'd like to pass, and what kind of media option you'd like. Are you looking for wireless? Gigabit Ethernet?

Go to routerboard.com and pick hardware that matches your media requirements and expected throughput, and comes with a level 4 license.

Basically I'm talking about distributing two 24 Mbits/s ADSL connections to the clients of a hotel. The router will need to have two WAN interfaces and 3-4 simple etherent interfaces so that i can connect a switch to these ethernet interfaces and distribute the connection to the other floors of the hotel maybe even by connecting a wireless AP to the switch. From what I understand any ethernet interface on a Mikrotik routerboard can be configured as a WAN interface or am I wrong? And can I determine the number of interfaces on a routerboard before I order it?

SoHo routers often distinguish WAN from LAN ports. The only reason for this is that the LAN ports are all sitting on an internal switch. On a RouterBOARD you can either reconfigure the switch to take ports out of it, or it doesn't have such a switch built in at all.

So yes, all ports can be WAN ports - on true routers it simply doesn't make sense to distinguish between WAN and LAN ports since all ports are just routed. The router doesn't care at all what's behind a port, it just routes packets.

If you look through the models at routerboard.com it obviously tells you how many ports the device has.

If you want to connect several switches to the router and have all of the be on the same network you'd want to buy a router with a built in switch chip (750x, 450x, 493x, 800 series), or use one switch connected to the router to connect the 3-4 switches to.

Ok fewi thank you very much for your response as it was very helpful. I'll investigate the models that you suggested.