Hi there,
Looking for a recommendation for hardware for running a small cafe/co-working space in Malaysia.
The internet it connects to maxes out at 50Mbps down and 10Mbps up. The capacity of the place is about 50 people. That’s mostly standing.
Thank you !
Do you need wireless or wired? Your signature says you have a RB951, did you try that one?
Hah, I thought my old Mikrotik would be too old / outdated. I guess mine would suffice, but alas it’s in use!
Was wondering if the new hAP lite would suffice: http://routerboard.com/RB941-2nD
Cheers,
If it is just about sharing Internet only without any other things (queues for example) you can use fasttrack so all actually possible devices will handle that. Your 951 also.
You even didn’t mention whether the clients will be connected by cables or wifi…
RE fasttrack & connection sharing. Is that automatically setup or do I need tweak that typically?
Internet comes for a VLAN/PPPoE “Unifi” connection btw in Malaysia btw.
Actually 951 should be faster than hAP.
In MT world older doesn’t mean worse 
A bit more information about the expected use would help; if it’s mostly a cafe where people sometimes use the wifi on their smartphones and the location is not too large a single hAP ac lite might do.
If it’s a larger space or it’s used for business as well that setup won’t suffice; if those 50 people are working fulltime you should count on seeing anywhere from 2 to 4 devices per person (think smartphone(s), tablets, smart watches, laptops, etc). Anything more than about 25-30 devices per radio tends to make wifi networks slow because of clients trying to talk at the same time. Also, in such a setup you’d want to do some sort of queuing (PCQ?) to prevent a single user from hogging all your bandwidth, so make sure you use a router with a decent CPU (RB-3011?).
Hi Hendry, I’ve been using an RB751G-2HnD in a restaurant in Midvalley Megamall for a few years now. Internet is 10/10mbps. Works quite well. Wifi is really congested here so the extra power helps. The restaurant is squarish in layout with no obstructions so just 1 AP was enough.
hAP Lite is suspect for 50/10mbps with QOS and firewall. CPU might not be fast enough and not much free mem but it all depends on how much QOS you have and how much active your users are.
hAP Lite makes for cheap and great APs though.
One radio (especially 2.4 GHz) alone could be a bit problematic depending on how many people want to use it simultaneously. You could buy three wireless APs (e.g. hAP lites, perfectly fine as cheap APs) and use the three non-overlapping channels (1, 6, 11). The SSID could than indicate there are three radios to choose from if they are in the same physical location. Otherwise you could use the same SSID and let the clients roam between them, of course.
If you want a cheap AP with 5 GHz, try the hAP ac lite. It has more RAM and some other additional features. Plus you get an additional wifi band to choose from for devices which support 5 GHz.
On the router side, every MikroTik device should be fast enough for a 50/10 connection, even a hAP lite. You could also experiment with Simple Queues for your upload. If you shape your connection to just below 10 Mbit/s (upload) and use a queue like SFQ (preconfigured as “wireless-default”) nobody could monopolize the bandwidth with one upload. SFQ guarantees a fair share of bandwidth between networking flows.
Absolutely agreed. I’ve been using multiple hAP Lites in an office. Works very well and very cheap too. Capsman is awesome. At the moment the biggest obstacle here is that the local supplies of hAP Lites are all of the TC variant so wall mounting is a bit of an inconvenience. Hope my suppliers will get some Classic units in.
As for AC, none available locally yet. I’m using DLink DAP-1665 which is quite good. Costs around USD50. UBNT UAP-AC-x for clients with a higher budget.