Once upon a time, Mikrotik equipment in the UK was very competitively priced, i.e. significantly cheaper than (say) Unifi. I’ve just priced up a cAP ax on LinITX and was surprised to find it’s one of the most expensive AX access points. Plus it’s only 1.7Gbps and most others are 2.9Gbps including cloud controller license. The cAP ax is £110 inc. VAT compared with the TP-Link EAP653 at £74. That’s nearly 50% more expensive. I really do try to like Mikrotik but it’s getting hard work
PS. It’s even 15% more expensive than the UniFi U6+ - that’s unheard of…
You can lookup the list prices of MikroTik equipment on the website. Those are US $ prices.
The cAP ax is listed at $129 which would be 100 UK pounds. When it is sold for 110 that does not seem unreasonably high, probably some local tax like VAT that isn’t applied in the US.
The price here is 118 euros so even more expensive than in the UK.
Conclusion: Brexit has nothing to do with that, it is just MikroTik stuff slowly becoming more expensive.
The math is simple ( Yes ).
BREXIT = break existing trade agreements for all products
BREXIT = negotiate new trade agreements ( at higher prices ) for as many products as possible
BREXIT = higher cost of living period for all in UK.
BREXIT = stupid ( unless you are Putin, who is far more intelligent then the leadership in the UK, and manipulated the uneducated masses through targeted campaigns of social media and financing discord )
Divide and conquer playbook masters!! ( Julius Caesar, Philip II of Macedon, Niccolò Machiavelli, Sun Tzu & Vladimir Putin )
Well, only as a side note, it is symmetrical, it has become also rather expensive to import from the UK, before Brexit it could be convenient to shop for used tech on e-bay because the (lower) selling price (generically) compensated for higher shipping costs, nowadays you have to add import duties and it makes it far less attractive.
Surprisingly, limiting the free circulation of goods (and people) increases costs.
We don't know the Mikrotik retail prices for nearby retailers, but I think they're not that high, and all the money goes to taxes and VAT.
For example, in Russia, where imports are also difficult, I can give you a range of prices I've bought in the last couple of months.
Last month, I bought an AX Lite LTE6 for $84, and I also bought an L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN for $99. We have a lot of AX2s for $105... I don't know how they're imported for those prices, but that's the final price. They're not popular, though, because regular home routers cost $30-40, and smart switches cost $15-30. Mikrotik can't compete with, say, the TPlink AC1200 AX1800, which costs $25.
Not know if it is that situation but it could be the effect of so called "gray import" (Assume that it is a common name in different countries for such kind of procedure)
When a "BIG" buyer makes an order for a container of routers, it gets a "VERY GOOD" offer, buys goods and then sell them to domestic clients and could export with prices better than "good offers" for just "big" buyers achievable in other countries.
Why "gray export/import"? As Producers could have different sales politics for each country. BIG sellers could not obey these rules and could sell with lower prices even they do not comply Producer's internal rules. Big sales make difference.
In fact, it doesn't matter where they buy them, how they deliver them, or how they pay for them, because there are no other manufacturers of these goods anywhere in the world, which means that the manufacturer sets the price... the rest is just a "delivery fee."
No, no, it’s a politics instrument. In a crisis, more stringent pressure measures are applied than in regular times. Ordinary people will always be the losers.
I suppose the question could also be “Is Mikrotik still cost effective in your country?”. When I started using Mikrotik, it was a very cost effective solution. Not so much now. Also, they do seem to drag their heels a little bit on the Wi-Fi side.
Just read about the new hAP ax S - now that does look interesting and might offset some of the above. Finally triple-chain 5GHz in a lower-end unit. Will be interested to see UK street price of the $79 dollar price:
of course not, the throughput numbers are horrible for anyone with a 1 gig connection.
Never fails to annoy me that they stick 5 1gig ports and one 2.5gig port but the realistic routing throughput is around 750Mbps. The ax2 ( and ac2 and ac3) is right around 1gig, the ax3 is around 1.2gigs.
They claim gigabit class, wow, so if the ports are gigabit, they can use that for false advertising? Even the wifi throughput is short of 1gig.
I personally do not see the reason for the hap ax S. To me its an admission that all our WiFI products to date have been woefully lacking in the wifi6 realm, and we dont have out poop together yet to give you wifi7, so here is a bone, but pay not attention to the lack of useful throughput. ( its like they are doing food profiteering, where the price remains the same but the package is smaller and there is less food inside.
Summary, who in their right mind is going to get this, and not wait for wifi7 before changing out any current AC2 to AX3 products?? If one is first time into the market, they will not even look at wifi 6.
Personally I don't get the fascination about triple-chain WiFi. Actually used MIMO rank is a compromise between both link peers (e.g. AP and station). If one doesn't support 3x3 MIMO, then rank will drop to e.g. 2x2 MIMO. And I don't know if all the modern clients, supporting 4x4 MIMO, are actually capable of falling back to 3x3 rather than 2x2. Then AP might use third antenna to e.g. improve reception. But gains will be negligible in most cases.
Anybody remembering the original hAP ac (RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT) device? It featured 3 chains for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. But due to slow CPU (single core MIPS BE at 720MHz) it was never a good performer, specified AC1750 is a joke.
Somehow I see hAP ax S in the same category ...
Ahh well that’s not good. One assumed that if one had a 2.5Gbps port then one would at least get full 1Gbps through the wired ports. Just looked at the block diagram. The natural 1Gbps WAN port (ether1) is handled by the CPU before it hits the 4-port switch? Assume that’s the bottleneck?
