Any body is having comparition of Mikrotik Router with Other Products.
I’m not aware of any side by side comparison with other products, here is our experience, by no means exhaustive, but does highlight a number of widely available products
MikroTik routers in their price bracket are by far the best product I’ve seen on the market. Yes, there are other products that may be better, but you’ll pay 4 or 5 times the price for them.
Our WISP started nearly 4 years ago initially using Alvarion 5.8GHz equipment. This is superb equipment, but very expensive, our start-up hardware costs were nearly 30,000 GBP! Had we known about MikroTik at the time of start-up our costs would have been a fraction of this. Alvarion have a policy of restricting client devices to 6Mbps download, this can be opened up to 54Mbps with a software key, but it costs more than twice that of a new RB532! They now also have cost reduced AP and Client equipment, the APs are restricted to 8 Clients and the Clients to a maximum of 4Mbps download.
We experimented with SmartBridges, initially only 802.11b, their new Nexus range is now 802.11a/b/g. The old 802.11b range was very good and our original units are still in service without a single failure in over 3 years, but are beginning to become a bottleneck with their restricted bandwidth. The new SmartBridges Nexus range in our experience is overpriced and not reliable, our AP died after 6 months and it was cheaper to rip everything out and replace with MikroTik.
We also tried LocustWorld Mesh, cheapish and cheerful, but support and functionality is poor on the free Public Domain version. However, the Public Domain version is largely built using Shell Scripts, so after much hacking I was able to make them do what I wanted. Minimum price of 1,000 GBP per year for 10 router support for “Pro” version of their software. They wouldn’t supply demo copies of Pro version and we’ve subsequently converted all our LocustWorld Mesh to MikroTik.
Our MikroTik Routers, 11 APs & 1 Client, have been in service for around 7 months. After initial teething problems with some wireless cards they are now very reliable, not a single failure.
My only comment about MikroTik is make sure you fully understand them and roll out in a controlled fashion. I spent six weeks trying various set-ups on a test bench before implementing in a production environment. In hindsight it would have been better to go from the test bench scenario to a live test on longer links, as I did have some problems when rolling out into the real world. This isn’t a problem when starting from a clean slate, but trying to upgrade an existing infrastructure whilst minimising disruption was somewhat problematic, more my fault than MikroTik’s.
Regards
Chris Macneill
Glenkens Broadband Ltd.
Thanks cmacneill,
Got so many ideas..Thanks again
Hows this, for the price, you can’t beat the product. The key is knowing how to implement it and another is to implement it the same way every time. I am a MT Reseller, and we only really sell fully assembled and tested MT solutions. Whole idea is that we have a known build method that works all the time. Thousands of these solutions are up and running. We have had MT 532s on towers, KNOWN to be struck by lighting (1400 foot tower), for over 1 1/2 years so far without much of a hickup!
I get a number of people that like the product, just don’t know what all the MTs can do.