Hello.
I administer a restaurant which has some POS equipment (5 iPads, 7 LAN receipt printers, 4 iZettle card terminals), 2 office computers and capacity of 250 guests (usually 50-80, most of which are not using the guest network).
Currently it’s being controlled by a RB2011UiAS-2HnD (the black one without radio, bought 2015), a D-Link DGS-1210-48 managed switch and four cAP AC. VLAN managed.
Today we had an internet outage (construction work in the street damaged the fiber), which lead to the immediate need for a LTE/5G solution.
An iPhone hotspot or similar isn’t a solution as the receipt printers and card terminals needs to be on the same net as the iPads.
I was looking into getting a hAP ax lite LTE6 and connecting this when LTE is needed.
But… The RB2011UiAS-2HnD is getting quite old (though a workhorse for us, and we never had problems). The hAP ax lite LTE6 has better specs, faster CPU, two cores, etc, and built-in radio (we currently use a cAP AC in the office space to give wifi for employees).
We only use 2 ports on the RB2011UiAS-2HnD (to WAN and the managed switch), so ports shouldn’t be a problem with the hAP ax lite LTE6.
So instead of having the RB2011 + cAP AP (and the backup LTE6), I could configure the LTE6 to replace all three units?
The only limitation I can see is hAP ax lite LTE6 is RouterOS level 4 vs 5 on the RB2011UiAS.
Would it be a sane choice to replace the RB2011 with hAP ax lite LTE6? Or some other choice?
PS: Restaurants aren’t in the money making business, so a budget router would be preferred.
Be aware that any ax device is not able to run the old CAPsMAN (which requires the wireless driver). In this case, you would have to upgrade the cAP ac to wifi-qcom-ac driver. Assuming they are currently running the wireless driver.
Just my guts feeling: I wouldn’t rely on the cheapest device and would choose i.e. a Chateau LTE6 (https://mikrotik.com/product/chateau_lte6). I think that this device is supplied with the wireless driver (as well as the cAP ac’s) and migrating to this device will decrease the impact significantly.
Hope that someone with more LTE experience can add additional information.
a. how often does the main internet go down?
b. what throughput or level of Cellular performance is good enough
c. what level of wifi connectivity is good enough…
What is shocking to me is that as the IT person of this network, states that that there was a failure with WAN1.
The failure was not ensuring a backup WAN for a business setting that relies on network connectivity for daily operations and profits.
Perhaps none available and Cellular backup was not previously available.
In any case, one has a number of decisions to make
a. quality of cellular connectivity
best is chateau 5G ax or the basic 5G for $100 less ( no ax).
b. quality of wifi connectivity
best would be tplink or zyxel wifi7 Access points for example
c. The RB2011 is an old router and an upgrade is reasonable and the chateau model above blows its socks off.
Thus I would probably get a 5G capable router and replace the Access points.
No use buying LTE when the next technology is available and thus the purchase will have a fundamentally longer ROI time and better customer satisfaction.
Another approach would be to separate out the functionalities
router - RB5009 ( good for 10 years )
Cellular - SXT_LTE6+kit ( and eventually replace when available an MT combo LTE/5G kit or 5G kit
wifi - tplink/zyxel wifi7 APs. ( good for 5 years or more depending upon tech change )
Making the assumption the OP has 5G in their area, or is likely to have in the future. There are still many areas where 5G isn’t available and isn’t likely to eventuate anytime soon, mainly in rural or small towns. There is more of a push for fibre infrastructure over 5G in tiny rural locations in my country, making 4G the go to for mobile networks.
So, I would recommend OP confirms if 5G is now (or likely to be) available to him before he spends more money than need be on a 5G router, when a 4G chateau might be sufficient.
For the telecom operators and network providers, it is way cheaper to upgrade the equipment on existing sites from “LTE” to “5G” than to install optical cables to new locations. So wherever there is an existing LTE coverage, 5G will arrive as soon as the capacity of LTE becomes insufficient.
The situation wildly differs among countries, but e.g. here, the MNO providing fixed internet basically said “move to 5G or we can’t guarantee you the same throughput for the ‘fixed wireless’ we did initially”, and the same MNO even publicly complains that people keep their phones for too long so it cannot switch 5G from NSA (coexisting with LTE and somewhat throttling throughput) to SA (fully replacing LTE) because too many people would lose connectivity.
So I’m fully with @anav here in terms that if there is 5G coverage already now, any LTE-only device is a short-term investment, it is unlikely to serve its purpose for the next ten years like the RB2011 did.
But if spending less money right now is more important than spending less money in total, the hAP ax lite LTE6 will definitely handle what RB2011 did, and you can even run the “wireless” CAPSMAN on it if you don’t mind that doing so will disable its own 2.4 GHz interface (because one has to remove the wifi-qcom package and install the wireless one).
I can’t comment for anywhere else, but where I live, the same companies that own or construct 4/5G infrastructure are not the same as those rolling out fibre infrastructure.
We have a former state-owned company which is in the business of fibre infrastructure (formally copper) and has no financial interest in mobile technologies. There are also a number of small WISPs that have now started installing fibre into rural areas as well. I’m talking about rural communities with 20 or more residents fairly close to each other. They realise that in order for them to survive and stay ahead, they need to diversify into fibre.
Now the upshot to this is that mobile operators are also realising that there is little financial benefit in providing an upgrade to thier 4G networks in rural locations, so they just leave their customers on 4G, or offload to the fibre providers or Musk’s fleet of low orbit satellites.
Sometimes mobile providers take their customers off 4G and put them on fibre where they have agreement with the fibre infrastructure company concerned. That way the mobile operator keeps their customer and the rural customer is happy with their fibre connection.
I’m fairly sure this won’t only be happening here, so I reiterate, best for the OP to check with his provider whether 5G is actually an option in his location before buying a more expensive piece of kit than one that would otherwise work fine. Might be he has 5G available, in which case go for it. But it does no harm to check anyway.
It has not really been a priority to have a backup plan, as internet rarely goes down. We are located in Oslo, Norway, and internet has been down only once since 2015. Infrastructure here is really great. Also, all the POS equipment can run offline, as long as you connect the master iPad to any hotspot briefly to sync at opening and closing of the day. There is no loss in profits, just because internet goes down. Just a bit hassle for the employees.
Throughput is not an issue. The POS tablet is pushing tiny amounts (MB, if not even kB) every 5 minutes or so.
I don’t understand the wifi connectivity question? Wifi is really great, and we have good coverage in every area of the restaurant (four cAP ac running CAPsMAN). Not the best handoff between access points when you move through the restaurant (but for the stationary POS equipment, a mac-filter ensures they only connect to the closest AP).
We have both excellent 4G and 5G, and both will be on for quite some time. I read a Digi-key article stating 4G will be active for at least 10 years (but the article is not dated). I just emailed the net owner (Telenor), to get an estimate.
I know the owners will never spring $5-600 for a 5G router, just in case internet goes down a few hours every 5 years
We’re not looking to upgrade the cAP ac any time soon. But if we upgrade to an LTE router, it would be nice to have builtin wifi so we can disconnect and keep the office cAP ac as a backup.
Yes I think so too. Although we rarely see that the RB is overloaded.
True, we probably go for the Chateau LTE6.
Currently all our cAP ac is using the wireless package. Are there any up/downsides with using the wifi-qcom-ac?
And maybe even more importantly, is CAPsMAN even the best choice when we only have 4 APs (5 during summer). I heard CAPsMAN is not very efficient, terrible speeds, etc.
I setting them all up manually with the same SSID a better choice?
The product page says that Chateau LTE6 has only 16 MB of flash whereas hAP ax lite LTE6 has 128 MB, so the hAP ax lite LTE6 is definitely a safer choice with regard to future software versions. It has just 2 cores rather than 4 of Chateau LTE6, and of course only 2.4 GHz WiFi which doesn’t matter in your use case.
CAPsMAN with local forwarding means the same speed like local configuration of wireless/wifi interfaces, as in that mode, CAPsMAN does not handle every single frame, it only controls the wireless interfaces, but each AP converts the wireless frames to Ethernet ones locally. CAPsMAN with capsman forwarding means additional encapsulation and decapsulation which may indeed affect speed. CAPsMAN for the wifi driver only supports local forwarding.
With wifi, you have to use CAPsMAN to get the roaming capabilities. I do use wifi-qcom-ac at home and the only problems I have encountered are related to an intel ax201 wifi card on Windows that used to get disconnected from a particular AP if running for tens of hours. Everything else is happy, but I don’t have any of the other devices known to trigger issues with the ax APs. Even this issue seems to be gone since I have moved the CAPsMAN to another device than the routing, although I may just be lucky.
