I only use ARMs as clients and I don’t see any problem.
I have throughput problem even with mibsbe in some cases, especially for client upload, or with NetMetal + mANT I only get 50Mbps throughput when with other vendors I get 200Mbps, but I think it’s a mANT problem.
Just setup an Omnitik ac, connect some clients, and do a ping to the MISPBE Clients and the same time to the ARM Clients, Mode 802.11
You will See high Pings on ARM without any reason, impossible to deliver Voice Service over this Hardware.
And whooop … back to topic 
@Normis Are you able to talk about 802.11ax ? At least what MUM to look at …
There are chipsets of your suppliers out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Silicon. So I guess you have something in your lab and as you did with 60GHz you might want to do some interesting move there … hopefully
Would be great if Mikrotik released at least minimalistic roadmap, something like: 802.11ax work in progress, expected ~2019Q3
Same for Wave2 and other features. No need to be more specific, just confirmation of “yes, we are really working on it”.
This might be enough to delay investment and buying of competitors products. Currently you wait, and wait and wait and nothing is happening, no news.
So you end up buying other company products, only to see Mikrotik release it month later. In the end it only hurts the Mikrotik sales…
+1 for this. Normis and colleagues at Mikrotik, we need a roadmap for wireless LAN products development for the near future. Mikrotik is my favorite and default goto device, but one can barely plan for the future as you guys hardly talk of what’s in store for the future! It’s by guesswork and keeping on hoping for the better. Put up a roadmap ASAP!!
802.11ax isn’t finalized yet.
You must be young.
The routers on the market are “draft” ax, as in public beta. Compatibility with the final product is not guaranteed.
ax is going to have better contention protocols and MUMIMO than ac, but not by much. Wave 2 with MUMIMO has that capability and the built in contention control may interfere with nstreme and nv2.
I imagine that ax is going to be a bit of a bear for MT to adapt to. Once they get it going it really does sound like a match made in heaven, however, it has so many WISP related features built in I believe it is going to cause them problems. They’ll probably disable most of those features in the initial version and slowly roll out updates with hardware support for the built in contention control.
Most likely chipsets will do the job already:
https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/infographic/Final-80211ax-release-date-now-slated-for-late-2019
I am not realy young But we need some upgrades soon.
Normis - re: ARM works very well. The only issue I know of, is lack of full compatibility with legacy Nv2 protocol.
If Nv2 is a legacy protocol, then how about Mikrotik create a next generation TDMA protocol. Call it Nv3 or something.
North Idaho Tom Jones
I hope there will be no next manufacturer-specific TMDA protocol but rather an established standard that all manufacturers follow and that allows inter-operation.
For 802.11ax, there should be no need for any custom TDMA protocol, because standard itself already have what you can call NV2 on steroids: Not only it’s TDMA, it can also assign different parts of spectrum to a different users for each timeslot… over multiple MIMO beams. And all this is handled by hardware chips, so with great precision and no requirements of main CPU to do the timing (and cause issues like with NV2 on ARM).
please 802.11ax IOT is killing the network , even solar panels now clutter up the wifi
I’ve been quietly following MT for many moons now, but I’m honestly clueless what is their business strategy. If this is thier tactics, they totally got it right, though!
Maybe MT focus on the last-mile and some backhaul? Maybe ISP edge? Or CPE/SOHO? Or maybe amateur projects? Or maybe stability before features? IDK…
All I now is that it’s 2019!!! 5G is being deployed even in Eastern Europe, .ax mainstream devices are almost flooding the streets these days, IoT is already wrecking havoc in some places, more and more spectrum is being made available worldwide. And I’m just sitting here, waiting for MT to release some modems above Cat.4 or at least improve compatibility with other vendors’ ones.
Guys, calm down. Chill a little. Forget MT Wireless. It’ll be like a breakup with a girl: hard, painful, expensive at first, much work, but you’ll get over it.
I did. I miss RouterOS superior management and features, since I hate web GUIs and limited console configuration options, I sweared much, missed mac-telnet, torch, l2 and l3 firewall, super flexible bridge and endless other configurations.. but at the end of the day what matters the most? Right! User experience!. As long as it works ok, you don’t really care any of that above mentioned stuff and have your chilled margaritas 
Let MT sell wireless eq in developing countries where 2Mbps are still called broadband. We need much more advanced stuff and get used that MT fail to deliver it, so let’s just jump the boat and stop bragging.. P.S. .ax alone won’t save them, IMHO.
This really made me ROFL. 
It’s sad but true, though. I now only use MT in a few very niche projects. Shame to watch such potential going to waste…
Dear Forum, Cheers to All. May your packets never queue. I’ve personally not had any problems with ARM, or NV2 as long as you remember that NV2 doesn’t work with poor link quality causing re-transmissions. In terms of the performance, it seems to work fine and the faster the processors the better. I really like the dual or quad core processors on the wireless wire and hoped every new unit had that much horsepower. I’m using all 802.11AC radios, and provide my clients with speeds between 10 and 40 mbps x 5, expecting to get no more than 15 clients per device PTMP. I can get 180mbps over the air all over town and 300mbps tcp on the bench one direction with AC. FDX is 100 TCP on bench, or 70mbps outdoors real world. I’m not sure what the rest of you are doing. There were some optimizations I learned early on (through the forum) to make things work right.. and it would be nice if mikrotik enabled some of those things by default as it seems to improve performance. Namely, the multicast helper(for NV2), interface queues (multi-queue ethernet default), ethernet flow control (on). I’ve been happy with the product and with NV2 compared with no NV2. the key with NV2 is that you can’t hookup clients with crappy signal, anything better than -65 is ok, but I prefer all clients in the -59 or better range. I configure all nv2 aps with 70 down and 30 up, typically a 2 or 3 ms, and turn hardware retries down to 2 rather than 7. All minor improvements that boosted overall performance, in addition to a current and stable version of firmware and routerboard software. We have used the Mtik Dish and Netmetal AC to spotlight areas from the tower, for instance a neighborhood with 200 homes 20 KM away from the tower. Then I’ve started to use the DynaDish and i’m pretty happy with the beam width as it trims out the local interference better than the QRT. Re-transmissions kill NV2. I am very hopeful for 60 G, and have been using two links to backhaul from tower to tower downtown for over a year at 350meters with no issue. (I strapped one to an old Canopy dish, and omg the signal is perfect if you have the patience to align it.) I am hoping that the new wireless wire dish will get an integrated AX radio so we can have a primary and secondary radio set in each link to allow for redundancy to the tower. (hint hint, nudge, nudge, wink, wink) I eagerly await the integration of new standards for AX, to keep us small WISPS ahead of the curve. My clients and I are happy with Mikrotik products and the versatility of such a powerful OS. If MTIK can help with the Wireless wire dish + AX radio, us small wisps can actually provide reliable service for 50 clients from one site and 5 GB of over air TCP data, allowing us to compete in small neighborhoods with the existing Cable operators.
Please gif us your ap and cpe configuration It is incredible¡
I’d like to address your comment in step-by-step:
- yes, you’re right, the RouterOS is increadible OS with it’s instruments, management, capabilities, etc.
- NV2 from ~6.42 has been updated and poor signal/quality clients no longer drag down the AP performance that much, also higher number of clients on AP doesn’t reduce the overal capacity of AP anymore (though they still could have done better). Together with TDD ratio, I call this NV2 update one of the best since the NV2 introduction. It actually works.
- Hardware retransmits doesn’t have an effect on NV2. It was mainly used back in the day for Nstreme.
- CPU power on AC CPEs is not everything. Higher performance CPUs mostly benefit on APs, especially when there’s such magic like GPS, beamforming, TDMA scheduling in play. Newer generation MT CPEs with >=600 MHz CPUs are usually enough.
- Sure, if your network is all on AC, you get some benefit from that. But I bet you’re on pretty clean RF over there, and furthermore you use some client-oriented devices for APs to filter out the interference. Because on MT, most advantages of AC come only in the form of higher modulations, which again are useless in noisy areas. You can use narrow beamwidth horn antennas to achieve the very same result and to have some more professional solution. We all think of various solutions to survive, so we’ve all been there, done what you said. And managed MikroTik wireless to live up to this day.
Now let’s get back to reality.. In this 4G LTE and comming 5G era, we have no chance to compete with current MikroTik products. We simply cannot. Sure, 4G is not available in some areas, but soon it will be when equipment rotation will start happening. To buy us few more years we need seriously reworked AP devices from MikroTik. With backward compatibility of course. Because competition is already far ahead of MT, and they showed us that it can be done - MT’s AC cannot outperform their 11N. And they also showed us that MT client devices are quite good and capable. So not everything is lost for MT yet. I remind MT few key features they somehow really need to work on: nearby channel filtering, proper GPS-sync for freq reuse, asymmetric fixed downlink/uplink datarate support, little more improvements in NV2 to call it NV3.
With “we”, you likely mean the small WISP that offers internet access to a couple of local paying customers using a WiFi network.
That is of course a niche application that works only in places where it can compete with better solutions like you mention.
In a highly populated area with large demands on internet bandwidth, such solutions never have been viable, no matter what make of equipment you use.
But it is not the only application for MikroTik equipment.
I’m not so sure 5G cellular is going to be the “bees knees”. Cell companies still have to roll out their hardware and i’ve got no faith in 5G given the current results of tests done in Dallas, LA, and Chicago. It won’t work through windows or much very well and i’m anticipating they will be nothing more than little wifi hotspots and it’s mostly hype to generate more sales. I’ve been installing for them for 14 years since 2.5 G cellular. They use overpriced hardware that doesn’t seem to perform well enough to justify the additional expense. The only thing the cell companies have is the ability to output at 300 times more power than ISM band WISPS. They have a huge budget, make record profits, and i’m sure they are lobbying to try and take over the 5Ghz to 6gHz band to further create more of a monopolistic situation to boost bottom lines and reduce competition from highly motivated small WISPS.
There is a bunch of interference in this valley. In Reality there are only 3 major tower sites where everyone and their brother co-locates to serve the 70-100 thousand inhabitants of this 6x10 mile valley. Spectrum and other local wired ISPs have most of the market share. However there are many people on the fringe who cannot use the 4g Network to operate, have low speeds from other ISPs, and the major players have no intention of providing services to the outlying areas, ever - without massive grants funded by further inflation and debt. I personally own a network that I paid cash for every component, after working for Cell companies and building their infrastructure and being beaten down by soulless huge spreadsheet management firms posing as capable construction management firms that pinch most of the profit and shed any responsibility.
In any case 802.11AX will likely perform as well or close to the expected performance of a nokia or alcatel or huawai base station. For the same price we can deploy 20 times the sectors and throughput with Mtik.. We already have a 5G style link performance with 802.11AD for a fraction of the price. I really don’t see much better performance from 4G than 802.11AC in terms of realized throughput. You pay the additional premium for better quality, higher powered components, with redundant power supplies, HVAC, and proprietary algorithms for TDMA that makes the medium more friendly and adds tons of latency. Since most providers enabled Unlimited access, at times my service is worse than dial up at times. Fact is that there are not enough towers, and they are not motivated financially enough to add outside of the core community centers.
If you’ve got a small WISP, build out a site, hold the root lease, then sublet to the Cell companies for 2K per month and you can win both ways. Or start putting fiber in the ground, and use your tower assets to fire licensed links to small fiber loops in select areas where you already have a handful of wireless clients… that’s what I’m doing. And it’s been very successful. I do feel us Small WISPs can fill a niche, and many folks would rather support a local company anyway than promote the corporate grab for concentrated power.