Want to put it to the staffers if they happen to read this - how difficult would it be to produce a few boards geared at home/SME CPE with:
a) Dual Band wifi
b) Perhaps 1 or 2 VoIP ATA ports, and SIP client built in to routeros?
On point (b), I am wondering also on the feasibility of an ‘extra’ module (like how usermanager is extra) to go on bigger models (RB1100AHx2 or CCR’s) that run a fairly basic PBX, so Mikrotik can be all in one router for voice as well as data!
The form factor of the RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN is nice, but its only 2.4ghz, seems to be a big trend to go for dual-band. Have also been using 951-2n’s for home CPE but wireless is pretty weak.
I’m not sure the hassles of going into VoIP with different regulations etc, and honestly it probably has been thought of and discarded as a waste of effort/resources, but thought i’d mention it see if it intrigues anyone and I might get lucky .
I can’t really see MTK going into the voice arena tbh.The horde of asterisk frontend devices/projects you can get nowadays is very very complete.That said if they make such a device I would deffo be interested in it for some of my tiny remote sites and finally get rid of Mitel/Cisco crap that I have to deal with .
Agree with the dual band thing . Hoping for a Dual Band AC router in the future
Those of us competing with the big cable & DSL players would find an integrated ATA very useful, in a market where people expect their internet and phone service “bundled”. Showing up with a separate ATA (and power cord, and patch cable) looks amateurish by comparison; worse, we have to make sure we can address their ATA–which means it has to be connected to a designated jack, or we have to step onto the subscriber’s LAN.
An RB951 with a built-in ATA (RJ-11 port on the back) would fit the bill nicely…
The ability to hand off FXS/FXO/Pri interfaces would be useful to service providers.
Although, given the choice between Mikrotik spreading themselves any thinner to support VoIP (a huge world in and of itself), and more bug fixes / networking features (IPv6 really lacks some key features - you can’t even use SLAAC to obtain an interface address, for instance - how basic is that?)
If I were to deliver an all-in-one soft PBX / Router, I would get an OpenWRT asterisk box, and run that as a metarouter image. It would be virtually indistinguishable from an all-in-one. Plus the PBX would be much more easily backed up and copied to a different platform in case of hardware failure. For those few legacy fax lines, you should push fax->email / print-to-fax services, and for the die-hard analog needs, use a 1 or two port ATA device.
I for one need the ability to also support sip based ATA devices using Mikrotik products.
In my opinion, rather than have a Mikrotik routerboard have an on-board SIP based ATA, I would rather have Mikrotik support a mini-PCI SIP ATA card (driver support needed). Then all of the Mikrotik based mini-PCI motherboards could support SIP ATA devices. Nothing special would be needed for a RB motherboard re-design or new design - only a router OS driver available as a an optional software package that would be enabled.
Also - keep in mind — if you are using SIP based ATAs, you also need to also support (by US law) a battery backup system for when the power goes out. Hence a potential issue - Existing Mikrotik products to not directly support standard UPS battery backup systems like the industry standard connectors used on a fiber ONT. So you are stuck using a SoHo home type UPS instead and then your head-end server equipment has no signaling for when the customer looses power and you fall back to battery operation at the customers locations. This could be overcome pretty easily by just using a dedicated Ethernet port on the Mikrotik routerboard as a dry-contact. Then let the OS determine the dry-contact state using states of the Ethernet (loop - link - receive link but no xmit link and the reverse). I do something like this on my cisco Ethernet switches with dry contacts to detect status of on or off - and the battery voltage could be detected by the routerboard OS to help determine remaining UPS run-time.
there was analog (uncommon, but produced)ATA-ports in SFP form-factor for devices with such.
as for VoIP - im more interested in VoIP server, than client. asked about Asterisk SERVER package addition aswell as Zabbix package(to ease management/monitoring).
Find an OpenWRT image that has Asterisk on it, and play around with that if you’re looking for just the server side.
Use that as a metarouter image. You could even use a USB flash device to store voicemail / recorded announcements.
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