Hi,
I am from India, I am thinking of purchasing Hex (RB750Gr3) to use with my broadbank which is currently ethernet but will be upgraded to fiber very soon. They ISP will provide a media converter (ONU) Fiber to Ethernet when upgrading to fiber, but I was looking at Hex S (RB760iGS) with a SFP port, I am not sure if the ISP uses EPON/GEPON/GPON ( I can check with them ), the authentication is auto-login by MAC ID.
Which router should I go for?
Regards & thanks,
Pradeep
Using xPON SFPs in Mikrotik devices directly is not supported. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t. If you don’t want to loose much time (and money), I suggest you to plan to use the ISP-provided ONU as a media converter.
Both devices you’re mentioning (hEX and hEX S) are more or less identical (apart from SFP port), so they should perform the same. hEX S is slightly more expensive (due to SFP port) though.
Thanks for the quick reply 
Yes I looked at the specs comparison, they are almost identical except for SFP & PoE on last port for Hex S.
Also, I hope I can do dual WAN configuration on Hex S too if needed.
Will post more queries after I start using it 
The design of the heX S limiteds the speed in the internal and it is not always wise to use the SFP and mostly you can better use the eth ports.
The (XOR)* in the diagram cuts one of the two lines and dedicate it to the SFP solely. It is still a great router.
hEX (and hEX S) is a pretty good device for its money. But when thinking about dual WAN of decent speeds (as implied by fibre infrastructure), hEX might be slightly underpowered as it can route at around 1Gbps (full duplex). If you foresee total routing throughput of more than 1Gbps, you’ll have to think about a faster router (RB4011 comes on my mind).
And that’s with fasttrack enabled for all traffic.
While dual WAN might need disabling it, if we are talking about combining the bandwidth somehow, and not only switching between active and backup links.
So yes, it is better to look for more powerful device if load balancing two or more links with combined speed of more than 500Mbps is needed.
“Getting fibre” means nothing to me, i.e. here we have soooooo many people on fibre with packages 5Mb/s - 50Mb/s
Something in between the hEX and 4011 series, is also the hAP AC², very nice little router
1Gig or up RB4011 (up to 4gig)
Below 1 gig hex S.
Hapac2 and hapac3 are both also capable of handling up to 1.5 gig but dont have SFP ports).
The Hex series in practice is more like in the 750-850 range and thus not suitable for a 1gig fiber connection.
The RB4011 would be a far better option in this scenario. as it may be the last router a person needs and many more folks have attempted
to do what the OP is potentially looking for with this router (so we have most info).
On my home I have hEX S for routing, CRS112-8P-4S for switching, and one Audience as… AP , and two CPE, one SXTsq 5 ac as main and one DynaDish 5 for failover
On hEX S i have dozen of firewall rules, http and https ad blocking, site blocking, etc. etc. etc.
hEX S work really smooth, but I do not live on city and I can provide to myself only until 100Mbp/s symmetric.
I have an hEX (not hEX S), and it is quite impressive what it does. Using PPPoE and a lot of fast path, this is what i get:
Dual WAN and, 1+gig network, etc… RB4011 much better suited.
If the network is less than <1 gig, Hex S should be fine, however if future growth to 1 gig or beyond, the RB4011 is a better long term investment.
Not that I dont like the hex, I have two, but relegated to switches with need for more juice as they were not up to the task of my 1 gig fiber network.
Thanks everyone for your valuable inputs.
This is the first time I am buying a separate router to configure it myself, all these years I have been using the ISP provided WiFi router or the plug-n-play WiFi routers from TP-Link.
I already have a Netgear WiFi router which I use as AP.
RB4011 is way out of my budget, it’s overpriced here in India, I guess because Mikrotik doesn’t sell directly here.
My ISP provides 120mbps currently, and I might upgrade to 200mbps in the next 1-2 years. I might get another connection as a backup, that’s why I enquired about dual WAN.
Also, my current router isn’t gigabit hence LAN traffic is slower than expected.
Wow :-o
0ms ping? self hosted speedtest…
Do realistic speedtest..
https://www.speedtest.net/result/11784773999
Confirmed, any speed test through Italy really slows down my connection!! ;-PP
PS. with 120-200Mbps hex S is a great purchase!!
Yes, it's hosted on the same ISP I use. We are testing the hEX capabilities, aren't we? Anything beyond the ISP network and we would be testing the ISP's quality - not the focus here. The traffic crossed the hEX, that's all that matters to answer the question "how fast can an hEX go?".
Here, since I know You won’t listen to reason. This test was made pointing to a server hosted by another ISP, in another city. Happy now?
Confirms what I have stated paternot. The hex is not 1gig capable otherwise the speeds showing should be around 940 Mbps. :-)))))
Yes, the hEX doesn’t do quite 1Gb. It gets almost there - and only with extensive fast path and ideal conditions. We have the PPPoE overhead, so it COULD go a little faster without it. Looking at the ether5 graphics (I used it reversed: eth1 is intranet and eth5 is WAN), it gets up to 972Mbps download. Upload it gets to 833.8Mbps.
With PPPoE we won’t get much better that this download speeds - overhead is a killer.
@Paternot, a self-test using “Predialnet” to “PredialNet” with 0ms is really not indicative of anything…
Is like to be run on same server where speedtest host is running… Or I’m wrong?
Your last test is perfect.
Tue or not, this does not mean that if you ever need help,
I would not try to give it to you …