Hex S is cheaper but MUCH slower than hAP ax2
RB450Gx4 is same price but slightly slower than hAP ax2
L009UiGS-RM is more expensive but still slower than hAP ax2
Am I missing something? I don’t want a router with built-in Wi-Fi but I have to buy router with built-in Wi-Fi because every other choice would be sub-optimal.
Obivously you don’t have to use the wifi provided by the router. Seems (to me) that there is not many requests for wifiless routers in that price range.
hEX S is not that much slower. What are you planning to do with the device? It is very much capable of handling a 1Gbit connection to the ISP at full speed. hAP ax2 is a newer ARM device and could be slightly faster, but is also more expensive.
The other different is the hEX S does NOT run zerotier, BTH, container, or some other newer V7 features. So that’s a disqualification in my book as it does not seem very “future proof”.
But hEX S does have PoE IN and OUT on separate ports, USB, and SD card – unlike the hAPax2… Now hEX S is wonderful device to run The Dude on (& hAPax2 isn’t since no SD/USB/ROSE for storage). But they have NOT updated The Dude in years.
So outside of Dude or storage-based needs, the hAPax2 likely be worth the few extra dollars IMO.
I think it’s better to pay a little bit extra and buy ax2, i mean router is not something that you buy every year. I assume OP wants to have this router for at least 5 years. So router should be future proof as much as possible.
MMIPS & MIPSBE are by far the most stable and reliable chips in the mikrotik range. HEX & HEX S thus hold value in that regard, hence I use them a hell of a lot and never have to question their stability. ARM chips have gotten better but are still unreliable in their performance metrics and do occasionally have weird issues.
RB3011 especially… what an absolutely horrible product. It works fine in many/most environments but i’ve had them do really stupid unexplainable things such as woefully bad upload performance when running traffic ‘through’ them at least 1 or 2 steps up from where traffic originates (which should be substantially faster) - very low CPU but pathetic performance
Copy/paste the entire config onto a HEX or CCR and the problem immediately vanishes. It’s not explainable by anyone, including MikroTik
Whilst i’ve generally had good success with ARM products, I only use them as a customer router. In which case sure it’s actually better for that purpose. For traffic distribution I try not to unless performance is a higher priority
Havn’t used the AX series products long enough to form any solid opinions. Bugs for sure but again they are customer focused so they don’t cripple or take down entire segments of the network, minimal impact. Running an entire hotel or as a backbone distribution? If I had to choose between a HAP AX2 or HEX S i’m going to take the HEX S for sure
When wireless or LTE is not needed I also use hEX or hEX S for our customers, great little routers indeed. When LTE is needed then wAP LTE kit is my way to go. Never had any problem with them.
But at few sites I installed hAP ax lite lte6 just because more ports were needed and I want to keep device count as low as possible and so far so good, stable as rock.
At home and office RB5009 and RB4011 and cAP ax (no problems whatsoever) In office I installed hEX S and it was great but we upgraded to gigabit fibre and poor thing just wasn’t able to handle all that traffic. Now RB4011 is doing a great job.
So as OP stated, use case is home and hAP ax2 is perfect for that role IMHO.
Sure there is (IMHO) a lot of confusion in Mikrotik’s offers.
Besides and before any consideration with speed, the Hex S has 16 MB only of storage, which seems to be already very tight, unless it is found a way to put the RoS on a diet, it likely won’t be upgradable for long, and the Ax2, besides having more storage and memory have the radios also, so in the future could be re-purposed as an Access Point.
What remains (for me) a mistery is where the L009 place is, I thought that it was a “beefier” hex (s) with more ports, but it seems that it is outperformed by the Ax2 in everything, so the only advantage is the 3 more ports (and the SFP) and the routerOS license 5 (instead of 4, which is anyway good enough for what, 99% of users)?
I have read that a possible issue with the Ax2 can be - if it is stressed - a tendence to overheat, and surely the L009 appears as much more capable of thermal dispersion, but I don’t think in a “normal” home this can happen or happen often.
The other thing that is not clear to me is (in the case of L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN, not the plainer/cheaper L009UiGS-RM) what sense does it make the (clever) form factor allowing 4 routers in a 1U rack space with the (only 2.4 GHz) radio (the big ears will need external antennas) and without 5 GHz radio it is hardly a stand-alone home router.
Surely there are “intended cases” for these L009 devices, but I am struggling to understand what they are.
I understand that, mainly because it is written all over the place on L009 pages, but if one has not an old RB2011 to replace?
So, is it a good switch, but not such a good router?
Or you happened to have a spare one and you just use it because you can?
Only as an example, I have an ancient Fujitsu thin client repurposed as a internal router (running an old Linux distro) for connecting a VLAN with another subnet, but I have that setup only because I had already that tiny PC (bought for an entirely different - failed - project) and wanted to experiment, if I was to go shopping for a suitable device I would have chosen something completely different.
The question/doubt was about why (in which cases) would someone like the OP, looking for a new router, prefer the L009 over another model.
Hex S is a little bit faster then L009 so to use L009 as router i don’t know… There is use cases but then, for 50USD or 60 USD more for L009 you get weaker performance. So hex S is a better choice there. Only if you have little bit more devices on your network that could benefit extra three ports that L009 offer.
I bought it just to be a switch, to se how it works. I use sfp1 and ether2-8 in bridge, and ether1 as an offbridge (because ether1 is connected to CPU directly so if you don’t want to load CPU much just avoid that port) and i don’t have any issues achieving max wired speed.
RB2011 is not even a particularly good switch, because it’s a combo of one 5-port 100Mbps switch and one 5-port 1Gbps switch … with decent but not great interconnect. L009 will be much better switch as all the ports (including SFP but excluding ether1) are handled by same switch chip. Which makes it a very good switch with out-of-band management port (ether1)
L009 is latest-gen device with potential to get additional features (it’s got decent amount of RAM and storage for upcoming optional packages). It’s got a robust case which acts as a cooling surface (unlike all those fancy mini tower gadgets like hAP ax2 or hAP ac2 which get pretty hot due to poor cooling design), so it may be pretty decent hard-working router for lower end of home internet access.
It beats me as well why a modern wireless device would be equipped with 2.4GHz radio only (unless they meant the wireless version to be some kind of IoT concentrator).
Wait, wait wait … you mean you actually studied the block diagram before making your buying decision ?
Now THAT’s a novel concept !
Why didn’t anyone think of that earlier …
