Along with the church network mentioned elsewhere, I’m also in the process of preplanning a major upgrade to my home network. I’m planning to mount the components in a Leviton Structured Media Enclosure, not a rack, and I do want a lot of PoE ports for security cameras, access points, VoIP telephones and the like. I also want capacity for a home-based video business (I have a good-quality scanner for 8mm and potentially 16mm movie film) and hosting my personal websites. I’d like to spend extra money now to eliminate choke points in the future, and as much as possible I’d like to be ready for potential future deployment of fiber to my neighborhood.
Since MikroTik doesn’t seem to make an 8-port POE switch I was looking at 2 or possibly even 3 Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 8 units along with a router to mount in the cabinet along with them. I was looking at Ubiquiti’s EdgeMax, but then I spotted MikroTik’s CRS106-1C-5S. It’s listed as a switch, but it runs Level 5 RouterOS and the description implies it can be used as a router. It also seems to have pretty impressive specs. Would this unit be suitable as a main router, with the switches connected to it by SFP patch cords? Note also that when I get everything up and running I will want the capability for dual WANs; my current ISP offers decent speed but their reliability has been less than stellar. The phone company can’t match their speed, but when I was using their service I almost never, ever suffered an outage.
Check compatibility of your PoE switch/router and the devices you plan on powering. I bought a Juniper 24 port PoE switch for the heck of it because it was cheap, and it won’t power most MikroTik devices because they are passive, and the switch is 802.1af/at.
There have been some posts on this board about using MikroTik switches as a router that “run out of gas”. Maybe search on some of the switch models for more details. I can’t see it happening with a home network unless you’re really using a lot of firewall rules or something similar.
There is supposed to be an 8 port PoE switch or router coming out soon. MikroTik talked about it at the MUM in Denver.
MikroTik announced the CRS112-8P-4S which is an 8 port 802.3af/at PoE switch. The CRS328-24P-4S+RM will be 24 port. Both will also support passive PoE. No idea when they will be released.
Piggybacking on this idea: I’ve never used RouterOS before; my first MikroTik router is still in the box while I’m installing the hardware at the church. But I just called Comcast to price the change to a static IP and I don’t like what I heard, especially when you tack on equipment rental (currently I own my own modem). AT&T has a much more reasonable package and their hardware is included, but all they can offer from my address is 5 Mbps upload speed. Can RouterOS be configured to accept connections on the AT&T static IPs and then service those connections with the higher bandwidth of the Comcast connection to optimize throughput?
Please forgive me if I’m clueless on important concepts here; I’m just getting my feet wet on these subjects.
I was told the 8 port model would be available in the middle of Q4 and an optional 48v power supply would be available for purchase which enables it to perform 802.3af/at.
I’m intending to see if that device will work to replace my 750Gr3 (hex) at home as my router. I intend to plug 2 WAP AC units and a CAP lite into it while reducing the amount of adapters I have going into the wall.
Although Mikrotik switches can be used as routers, they are not very good at this role - weak CPU and not much memory. Just get the POE switches that are better for you, and buy a separate router.
I don’t know your needs, speedwise, but take a look at this unit:
5 gigabit ethernet, 256MiB of RAM, and a dual core - quad thread processor. The onboard storage is quite small - but it takes SD and USB. Take a look, and see if it is good enough to your needs.
It can be configured to work with any IP address, from any provider. You can also use DynDNS or NoIP to update a dynamic DNS entry with a non-static IP address.