RB600 ether port failures

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

We have deployed all kinds of routerboards, but our RB600s have by far the worst failure rate for Ethernet ports. Of our five RB600s:

  • one (RB600) had ether1 dead on arrival: POE works to power the unit, but won’t pass data.
  • one (RB600A) had ether1 go bad in the field in the same way (power, no data), then ether2 failed a couple months after we started using it for data. Now it’s on its last working ether port.
  • one (RB600A) developed a persistent 10-15% packet loss over ether1.

Of all our other equipment (532s, 411s, 333s, etc.), we have seen only one ether port go bad, and that was in the aftermath of a very nearby lightning strike.

Back when we bought our original RB600 and discovered its failure, I remember reading claims of the use of inferior ethernet components in their manufacture. I don’t remember whether it was the ports themselves or the semiconductors behind them, and my searches haven’t been able to find those posts again. When we bought the four RB600As, we assumed that any issues that had been discovered in the original RB600 would have been addressed, but the statistics are difficult to overlook.

Has anyone else found the RB600(A)'s ethernet ports to be failure-prone? Does anyone know if more recently-built RB600As use more durable components? We had hoped the RB600A would play a key role in our wireless backbone, but unless this issue has been resolved, we don’t dare buy any more.

2

Hello!

We have same experience, ether1 failed after 3 years in production, two other ethernet ports still working.

Before it failed, it had problem to connect att 100 FDX, most often it came up with 10FDX and there was rx packet errors which we thought was FM tower disturbance but it was not, we “rf” and “ground” secured the whole site, it seem to have helped but after yet some months of operation ether1 failed fully instead.

RB600 board was replaced with a spare, now all is back to normal again, the faulty board went back to our lab for investigation, hope it can give something,

By reading on the forums here, it seems like there are some problem with RB600 and ethernet ports. Also RB600 lack some important features like voltage sensors and temperature sensors.

Unfortunately our basestations is built upon RB600…