The router we purchased advertises Dual WAN capability but simply doesn’t work.
I’m looking to get a Mikrotik Router and configure it to use the two ISP connections and was wondering which one to get for my desired setup with the ff. requirements
Fast Failover for the two ISPs (ISP 1 is the primary, ISP 2 when ISP 1 goes down)
Route specific computers/devices to use ISP 2 only, and have them failover to ISP 1 only when ISP 2 goes down
We don’t have any other special requirements for our network (no VPN, no VLANs). Maybe a PiHole in the future running off of a raspberry Pi but that’s it.
For these requirements, I dont know if the MikroTik RB750Gr3 HEX GR3 is enough for the two connections in terms of its power.
Would using my Asus Router as the main router for DHCP, QoS and use the Mikrotik Router only to handle the failover alleviate the requirement from the Mikrotik unit? Though I believe i wont be able to route specific devices for ISP 2 only if that was the case.
I’m also amenable to just using a Mikrotik Router as the primary router for everything but I suspect I’ll be needing a much higher end one like the MikroTik RB5009 which i’m also open to getting.
My only apprehension is that I dont know anything about networking and the interface for setting up á mikrotik router to handle everything is daunting to me.
Looking for suggestions on the best way to go, and which unit would best fit my requirements.
The minimum router to do what you ask is probably the hapac2 and if you dont want to use its wifi, simply dont enable the WLAN.
My personal recommendation (budget allowing) is the older rb4011 or for only a few bucks more, the newer RB5009 (better bang for the buck).
And no, keeping ASUS for performing certain tasks doesn’t make Mikrotik’s workload considerably lower, but potentially complicates things.
My opinion is that hEX will not be up to task, I have doubts about hAP ac2 as well. Official test results show performance in case where device can be highly tuned for relatively trivial routing, hence fasttrack can be enabled. In scenario with dual WAN with fail-over it is very likely that fasttrack won’t be enabled (some features, such as connection mangling, are not compatible with fasttrack), which means lower maximum performance. And you are looking at throughputs up to 2Gbps (test results show combined Tx+Rx throughput, your combined peak throughput can be as high as 2.6Gbps) …
ASUS has buggy firmware, and if I remember correctly, getting the Dual Wan failover feature to work requires manually setting the DHCP list. If you tried getting help to no avail where Merlin lives, then MT is a good solution.
I agree with both previous posters, the entry level hEX and hAP ac2 will be under powered without Fasttrack for the bandwidth you have. Oddly, where I live, the RB5009 is actually cheaper right now than the RB4011, so that would be my choice. Be sure to check the v7 firmware threads for reported bugs though, because it will probably be a year before everything is sorted with the new kernel versions.
If you want literally all in one, then the RB4011 is available with built in wireless. Or you could downgrade your Asus to just act as a wireless AP and use an RB5009.