I see a lot of threads saying Mikrotik is not great in the wireless space (I agree, I use Mikrotik only for routing and firewall and then I use Unifi APs for wireless (just dump APs no settings/controller etc), but wonder what am I missing, why is this the case that it appears Mikrotik is not on the ball in the Wireless throughput/antenna-design/power sector?
So, I suppose what I am trying to ask is, is there a specific reason why MikroTik is not trying to play in the wireless space (I mean the Cap and hAPs are nice, but they don’t match the UAPs), it feels like they are intentionally not putting in an effort in the wireless space and I am just wondering why and if I am missing something?
Mikrotik is good is routing and other but wireless performance is not good as other specific wireless AP brands.
If you want to use controller, you can choose like Cambium,IgniteNet they support free cloud controller.
For reasons unknown, Mikrotik are very against using open source, and this results in an outdated Linux kernel and custom written drivers and services. This greatly slows development time compared to other manufacturers who use open source on the software side and then focus on building their hardware. For Mikrotik to implement things like 802.11ac Wave2 and 802.11ax they would currently have to write all the code (and likely introduce many bugs), whereas other vendors simply update their kernel and driver and it’s all ready to go. This is also why various 802.11 features are not supported on Mikrotik.
While I totally honor the way MT are building the entire stack from scratch, by themselves, I really loathe the closed-source they distribute (mainly due to security reasons).
I believe MT are very proud of their RouterOS & SwitchOS, and they are trying to keep their know-how and labor hidden from copycats. While understandable, that is not going to work well in the long run…