Hello. I am new. In fact, before today I never heard of MicroTik. I ran into a problem and someone on SmallNetworkBuilders suggested I look at MicroTik.
I’m considering the RB2011 but want to know if it is suitable.
Currently my WAN is only 15/1 DSL but they are upgrading to Fibre 100/20 in coming months. I need it to be compatible with both (I have zero experience with Fibre).
I’m not concerned about WiFi.
My current problem with my consumer-grade router is bandwidth sharing with my roommate. I can limit each of us to 50% but then when one isn’t using it, the other 50% is “wasted”. What I want is to be able to share the bandwidth such that 100% (or near it - I understand there will be overhead) is available to either party if possible, but 50% is guaranteed to each. Is that possible with this OS?
Some people say it is impossible to control download, but that doesn’t make sense to me since my current router can effectively cap each device. I figure a smarter router should be able to dynamically adjust that cap based on availability (or something to that end)
At the same time, I’d like our (shared) VOIP to have top priority. I can do that with my current router so I’m sure that won’t be an issue.
Thanks for your guidance. I’m not looking for a hand-holding step-by-step… just want to know if this hardware will help me with my goal or not.
I posted on smallnetworkbuilders and was told the RB2011 was a weak, “old” router that won’t keep up. Is that the case? I thought even the little hEX Lite would handle my needs. I get that either probably won’t be ideal with gigabit internet, but that’s nowhere on my horizon.
It’s true you can not really control download (i.e. the traffic coming in your WAN port), however you can control the traffic going out your LAN port(s). Technically, it’s not the same, however it will do what you want in wast majority of situations.
RB2011 should be powerful enough to handle 100/20 link. However it all depends on the complexity of your configuration. You need queues, so you will not be able to use fastpath/fasttrack, but even without these features RB2011 should be fast enough for your needs. You can find some numbers at the bottom of this page.
And as I understand it, I will not be able to use it. The whole value of this router, to me, is its ability to queue in more advanced ways than my current Asus router. In fact, my Asus has huge thoroughput as-is… speed is not my concern (althought, lack of it certainly would be).
I lab-tested the 2011 back when it was new and had quite an intricate maze of firewall rules / queue trees for QoS and rate-limiting, and mangle table rules. It was able to handle rate-limiting to 80Mbps / 20Mbps with significantly higher back-pressure (meaning that I was shooting over 100Mbps at it and it was queueing down to 80) and maintained perfect voice quality on a phone and no loss in video quality on a Youtube stream + downloads going on all at once. It got to around 80% cpu as I recall (this was in 2013 so I don’t remember perfectly). This was before fastpath/fasttrack was invented, so that should be a rough idea of what you can expect to see out of it w/o fasttrack.
The queues shouldn’t be too bad - look into PCC queueing for your solution, which does what you want - fairly divide bandwidth between clients, while allowing the full pipe if only one of the clients is doing anything at the moment.
I thought that might be the case, but didn’t want to presume. Google (yeah, thank’s for assuming I’m an idiot jarda ) quickly showed me PCC was a relevant term for this discussion, but I couldn’t find anything within Mikrotik’s documentation.
) quickly showed me PCC was a relevant term for this discussion, but I couldn’t find anything within Mikrotik’s documentation.