Hi,
in my city there will be a tender for a big (500 access points in the first phase) wireless network project (metro wifi). As far as I know only Cisco and some other vendor have been considered until now. This is why I am wondering what are the largest MikroTik wifi setups? How many access points? Any links, experiences? Is MikroTik ready for such projects or not yet? (I guess management of a large number of access points is still painful?)
Thanks,
Nejc
Hi,
From my point of view and expireance MT is ready for every thing over here we did bid for 120 Km to be covered all the way as ptp,ptmp and hotspot and we did run a test all was perfect but cisco got the bid.
Thanks
This is a hard one, in a lot of cases the decision is made based on “Nobody gets fired for buying Cisco” even though it may not have been the best product for the job, it is often chosen as they are so well known in the marketplace and a lot of people having only heard of Cisco assume that it’s the best/safest option. Here in NZ we call this phenomenon “No Teal no Deal”
But, yes Mikrotik is more than ready for these sort of projects. It is mature, stable, well documented and there is excellent support from both Mikrotik and these forums.
In my opinion RouterOS is much nicer to use than IOS, it is also far more feature rich. e.g. you could run a PPPoE concentrator on a RB411 if you really wanted to (not reccomended though!)
It also provides excellent visibility into what is happening when you have an issue, check out the “torch” feature if you are not familiar with it, as well as the clarity of log messages.
Mikrotik has been used in many large hotspot networks, and is used by I would say the majority of WISP’s in some capacity (wireless, pppoe concentrator, routing, traffic shaping)
There are lots of huge wireless networks based only on mikrotik. Boingo uses it many of the biggest USA airport hotspots. Mikrotik installed main connections in Afghanistan and Kosovo after the wars.
Some of these are mentioned here (scroll way down): http://www.mikrotik.com/press.html and also here: http://www.mikrotik.com/projects.html
but we stopped to update those pages, as we ourselves no longer do the installations, and it’s hard to keep track of what our customers are doing, there is just too many large projects out there.
Mikrotik is used much more than you probably imagine 
In republic of Georgia we have a GGN network (Georgian Governmental Network) all based on Mikrotik.
More then 800 governmental buildings are connected in this wireless network.
This project equipment cost was only 1m$ .
Provider who deployed this network had ROI in 5 month that I think is a huge success.
such project on vendor like motorola may cost 20 millions if not more.
Clever people don’t pay more only just for vendor name.