Good morning,
I livein Italy and I have a FTTH 1 Gbps internet access with Vodafone.
Vodafone provides to me their modem\router\WiFi all in one device called “Vodafone station”.
Of course it works and the speed is very good, being 1 Gbps down and 200 Mbps down (yes I can reach the full spedd)
The problem is that this router has no chance to be configured … you have to take it as is it, no more.
So I was looking for a router much more customizable (VPN, Vlan, firewalling, etc.).
I know quite well Cisco products, but for my home they are too expensive, so I wish to have a try with Mikrotik.
Here the connection specifications provided by Vodafone to use their FTTH with other router:
type FTTH
Encapsulation VLan Ethernet 802.1q
VLan 1036
What Mikrotik model do you suggest compatible to the above specs with no performance downgrade versus the stok vodafone station?
My thought (and other may have other thoughts): RB4011 … either wired-only or wireless model. There’s only one possible show-stopper: Mikrotik devices are sometimes picky about support for particular SFP modules. So if your ISP requests usage of particular SFP module this might be problematic. If they use generic SFPs (e.g. single-mode 1310nm modules), there are SFP modules working fine with RB4011 and you should be fine.
The rest (VLANs, etc.) are well supported in RouterOS.
Thanks for the prompt feedback.
The SFP slot is not a must have, since I already have a Huawey OTN, so… at the end of the story I can go even without the SPF and just copper.
Is it mandatory to choose RBxxxx series?
Any problems with the hEX ?
If you don’t require SFP cage and you also don’t require wireless, then you can go with hEX line. But beware of throughput capacity. All official product pages have section with Test results (example for RB4011). Look in table “Ethernet test results”. My own experience (quite a few other forum members agree) is that most rea-life relevant figure is the one in “Routing … 25 ip filter rules” “512 byte” … for RB4011 the figure I’m talking about is 2,560.8 Mbps. This number includes all routing done by device (e.g. if you had a DMZ subnet, it would include traffic in all 3 directions: internet<->DMZ, internet<->LAN and DMZ<->LAN.
Since you have a 1Gbps service, go for model which has this figure at least around 1Gbps. Note that wireless interface can be fully disabled if you don’t need it. Hence some find hAP ac² very attractive even if it’s used only as wired router. It could be on the performance limit with 1Gbps WAN line though. hEX will likely lack needed CPU power.
With the hEX you likely will have problems to achieve your goal of a 1Gbps internet connection.
I recommend you when looking at “performance specs” to divide the numbers at least by 2.
Not that the specs are dishonest, but the way those standardized tests are done tends not to really match with the typical configuration and usage.
Of course when your subscription is only 200 Mbps and only the physical line is 1 Gbps (not so clear from your original post which mentions two different down speeds), hEX is OK.
You have several decent options.
HapAC2
HapAC3
RB4011 with WIFI.
I have a couple of hexes and they could not get to my one gig throughput.
The cheapest 1 gig capable not wifi device for me is the routerboard RB450Gx4 and it could handle it, after that the RB4011 non wireless version
Other than that the other options above are best for combo wifi and router.
Many thanks for your feedback.
i understand that the throughput depends on the workload that is applied.
I use every day my 200 Mbps upload speed to backup my home\office landscape into the cloud, and I see that 200 Mbps era not a problem
On the other side, since I do not have on premise all the disk space that I need, very often I have to retrive from the the cloud my work. Most of them are audio\video\drawings\etc
During the download I reach not less than 700 Mbps, while a stupid SpeedTest says 980 Mbps (let me say it is 1 Gbps).
If I try to download a bounch of files with Torrent, i get 1 Gbps having a lot of parallel threads
Let me approach the question in this way:
with the router coming for free from the provider, SpeedTest says 1 Gbps (down)
running some Torrent downloads, again I get 1 Gbps
I do not know how SpeedTest or Torrent work… so this is the problem
The performce charts ok Mikrotik devices report different speed according to different scenarios…
Just to compare apples with apples… what would be the correct number to look at in the Mikrotik “test results” to be comparable with my 1 Gbps I have with SpeedTest or Torrent?
Consider that on my Vodafone router I have everything closed and just two port forwarding for services I need to access from remote (OpenVPN and HTTPS)
As I wrote before: I would suggest that you look at the test results and select a router that can do routing (25 filter rules) with 2 times the line speed you have.
So models like the hAP AC3 and RB4011 will be fine. The hEX can theoretically do 1Gbps routing but in practice you will not always achieve that, depending on your configuration.
For the simple use case you are depicting now it will probably work OK, but as soon as you need to disable fast path for some reason you will get into trouble.
It all depends if you want to save some money now and then later will have to struggle and maybe again buy something.
As stated above, I normally check out Test Results - 512 byte
Select Mbps scroll down to 25 simple queues. For the hex this equates to 735Mpbs which is the closest value to real world I have been able to elicit from the tables.
Depending upon load you may be somewhere between 25 filter rules and 25 queue rules. Some people report being able to achieve the None(fast path) speed but that is rare.
According to you,
how can the Vodafone stock modem\router, a very cheap device, equipped with 400 Mhz dual core CPU and running a custom image of WRT, be capable to squeeze all the 1000 Mbps ?
I performed a test right now: loading the down link to the max, almost 1 Gbps, with 10 torrents, a long iPerf session and a download from GDrive, the Vodafone stock modem\router runs with the CPU no more than 30% and 40% of the memory.
You asked for a recommendation which model to buy in your situation.
You got it. Please feel free to ignore those suggestions and buy what you already had in mind.
Nobody here is bothered when you do so.
I appreciate very much the suggestions I got from the forum!!!
I am just trying to understand why a router with 400 MHz CPU and running some kind of WRT can perfom in this way.
I am not complaining with anyone here. This is not my intention and I appreciate what I got, since I was almost ready to get the hEX-S
After some search, I found the RB40 at a very good price here and I am almost ready to buy it
Now I have an addtional question: with such router I culd potentially remove the ONT provided by Vodafone and plug the fiber directly into the RB40.
I just need a SFP module and… here cames the question: what kind of SFP moduel should I buy?
The ONT I have now is a
ONT Huawei EchoLife HG8010H
is there any way to understand the correct SFP knowing that the HG8010H is perfect ?
That is tricky business… MikroTik used to have a GPON ONU as SFP module in their product gamma but there often have been questions about getting it to work with an ISP because e.g. the ISP checks or authenticates with the MAC address or serial number and it would not work when the ISP-provided router or ONT was replaced with such a device.
E.g. check the topic “Usage GPON module SFP in Spain”… 444 replies to the topic.
But for another ISP it may be trivial.
in some cases here, Vodafone provides a ONT then their router (the so called Vodafone Station) is wired with Ethernet cable to to ONT
in other cases Vodafone provides the Vodafone Station without the ONT and in such cases in their router there is a SFP Huawei Ma5671a
If someone is in the case 1) and wish to move by his own to 2) then these are the rules:
-) buy the SFP, many available on ebay
a) disconnect the router from the ONT
b) connect a PC to the ONT. the IP of the ONT is 192.168.100.1
c) login into the ONT by opening the web page of the ONT (user and password are provided by Vodafone)
d) Enter the authentication tab and copy the authentication password
e) plug the SFP module into the Vodafone router
f) remove the fiber from the ONT and connetc the fber to the SFP
g) power on the router, longin and
h) paste the password mentioned in d) in the SFP section of the router (Vodafone can provide the ONT password by calling the call center, it is something like the customer ID…)
