I need official answer from Mikrotik about current state of following protocols on Mikrotik devices (RouterOS):
802.11k
802.11r
802.11v
802.11w
Please add for all above mentioned, at least following information:
is currently supported?
already in official development, and at least month/year when it would be released as beta and final
planed to be added, but not in development yet, and at least month/year when you start on development, and when it would be released
not planed / no support in next 2 years
Reason: I am planning to do some projects with Mikrotik devices, and right now, those protocols are required almost in any project available.
If it would be at least in development and released in “visible future”, some of those project could be realized, but there must be official confirmation from Mikrotik, then those would be added later (and when).
I need direct answer, if there is any hope to stay on Mikrotik, or to look for other similar products from other vendor.
Thank you very much and have a nice day.
(And for Mikrotik community: are those supported via alternative firmware/OS on Mikrotik HW, like OpenVRT and etc?, do have someone real personal experience with that?)
Even the cheapest access points given as freebies with ISP contracts now support it. MikroTik is the last in the WiFi world to add these.
When we are unlucky, they will put the support for this only in their wave2 driver which will run (almost) only on new devices.
(due to the silly 16M flash used in almost all current devices)
Yeah agree, they are common in consumer and corporate, high end and low end gear. That is the point of open standards after all.
In my opinion we really need to understand
(a) What MikroTik’s views / intentions are on these things; perhaps they do not agree with some standards as they have alternatives, maybe there are roadblocks to their adoption
(b) MikroTik to share as much roadmap as they have e.g. what are they working on but dont have an ETA for yet, and what is coming up and [very roughly] when
I was really pleased to see that the new WiFi Wave 2 driver supports WPA3, OWE, 802.11w, MU-MIMO and beamforming. The limited range of compatable hardwareis a concern however… so it would help to understand if they anticipate this eventually being supported on the existing range as the code matures and is made more efficient. Or if we will need to replace our WAP’s to gain them.
Let me be clear there are lots of great features in RouterOS and the hardware. I’m personally heavily invested in MikroTik, both in terms of buying equipment and time spent perfecting it (my knowledge, scripting, config).
Besides WPA3, OWE, 802.11w, MU-MIMO and beamforming. I would love to understand their thoughts on standards like 802.11k/r/v, 802.11ax. And extending RouterOS to be able to create directories, SHA2 hash strings or files etc…
thanks for keeping this post up.
I think the modern time is requesting more and more support for mobile devices, Mikrotik should consider this a priority for its development.
May somebody tell if there may be any kind of incompatibility from the old NICs with handover protocols mentioned here, in my opinion is just a question of software development.
There likely is no chip compatibility issue, but there might well be a code size problem. Many MikroTik devices have only 16M flash space, and as we all know it is very important to have SMB, Proxy Server, “detect internet”, “kid control” etc etc so there might well be no space for 2005 vintage WiFi protocols!
MikroTik could provide a separate kind of “wifiwave2-lite” package for IPQ/4018/IPQ4019 devices with 16MB of ROM. It would fit into the flash ROM, I think:
Luckly it’s possible to select which packages we need, so in case there may be a space problem I can avoid with pleasure to install SMB, kid controls, etc.
I guess 802.11k,802.11r,802.11v,802.11w won’t take too much space, I hope..
Let’s hope they will tink about them soon
No, not in v7. In v7 almost everything is bundled in single package … everything one really needs on hAP ac2 is actually part of single package and you can not get rid of it. And that includes SMB, proxy, etc.
Installing wifiwave2 on audience requires at least 64MB disk partition (storage consumption is almost 50MB) … and partitioning audience’s 128MB flash means that upgrades are not possible any more (audience doesn’t have RAM disk so upgrade packages are downloaded to flash disk). hAP ac2 is slightly different, but I highly doubt wifiwave2 (even in lite version) is possible on 16MB flash (unbundled ROS 6.49.3 uses 15MB of flash and according to my experience, ROS v7 doesn’t use much less storage than v6).
Eaxctly! I can fully understand why it would have become very difficult to keep “dhcp”, “security”, “ppp”, “IPv6” etc as separate packages because there would be many inter-dependencies between low level packages like that. However, IMHO it was a bad move to put EVERYTHING in a single package. Applications like SMB and Proxy can easily be isolated in a separate package without complicated dependencies, and likely almost nobody uses these. Some devices even lack the storage (and expansion capability) to use them.
The wireless stuff should have been kept separate as well.
I am just another user and integrator of Mikrotk devices around home and small offices.. wishing for roaming and WiFi 6 features to catch up. Most preferably for some 16MB devices that I have invested in (these are usually just plain wireless AP, with no need for any fancy functionality).
Either way I am (and lot of other people too) looking towards alternate brands. If I have to go with OpenWRT I might as well do it on non Mikrotik device.
