I know there have been previous posts regarding supporting the Sangoma S518 ADSL cards, but that doesn’t mean the need has gone away, so I would like to re-open the thread.
Previous posts have given a reason for not supporting this card as no GPL drivers being available. However, I use another Linux based GPL router product called BondedCD http://www.upstreaminter.net/fm which supports these cards, so why not MikroTik?
MikroTik already has support for Sangoma’s WANPIPE, it is my understanding that the S518 card uses this same architecture, so it should be just a simple matter of implementing appropriate configuration screens.
It would be really useful to have support for S518 and then I could ditch the BondedCD routers, these don’t support BGP, RIP or OSPF so are a real pain in a network that is larger than a single subnet.
I currently use BondedCD to aggregate multiple ADSL connections into a single ML-PPP pipe. Note, you need an ISP that supports ML-PPP. With multiple 2M/256K links we saw a real throughput in both directions equal to the number of bonded ADSL channels, however with MaxDSL (8M/800K) we only see an improvement in the upload direction, 2M with 3 channels, useful for hosting VPN endpoints, but download rarely exceeds 6M irrespective of the number of channels. This appears to be a limitation imposed by British Telecom at the exchange level, as some people do seem to achieve 10M and more with only two channels.
I would happy to be a Alpha/Beta tester if this is implemented.
Generally, there is a huge market for ADSL/wireless routers, namely domestic/home routers (market dominated by Netgear, Dlink etc). Not sure that’s MT’s market but business solutions would/should be.
I bet a lot of end users would prefer an MT solution rather than the generic commodity routers, even if it cost more.
Dual feeds to separate providers for resilience would be a good motivation to use it.
There are some embedded low-cost boards available with integrated PCI slot(s), which overcomes that obstacle.
However, I can see another real demand for integrated ADSL support, which is backhaul for WiFi hotspots. An all-in-one solution would be quite neat - RJ11 telephone cable direct into the router, and just power from an external “brick”.
Not sure whether you could use the telephone 48V to power the router either technically or legally though …
Actually, I was about to post exactly the same request. We also need to do ML-PPP across several ADSL links from a few machines at the edge of a network.
All of the core/access routers on this network are powered RouterOS and we’d like to keep it the same at the edge instead of going with straight Linux or Cisco IOS.
You can’t do ML-PPP with external ADSL-Ethernet modems plus it means extra external boxes and cables for each additional ADSL line.
I’ve added this to the features vote on the wiki (At the bottom as there’s only one vote to being with ) as well as DHCPD failover which is something else we need.
To echo freethought, using external ADSL modems won’t work with ML-PPP, so you can’t bond multiple ADSL channels to improve bandwidth.
I agree that if all you want is one ADSL connection, then an external modem is satisfactory, but that’s not the problem I’m trying to solve.
I already have a Linux box supporting the Sangoma modems with ML-PPP, I just want to consolidate things to remove an additional single point of failure.
I was wondering what linux box you use to support Sangoma modems with ML-PPP. I tried to use bonded CD but my ISP does not support PPPoA only PPPoE so I am looking for other alternative.
You need to use an ISP that supports ML-PPP, unfortunately not many do, you usually have to seek out the small independent technical ISPs, not the mass market ones as they’re only interested in volume.
If you’re in the UK then the guy that produced BondedCD runs his own ISP specialising in ML-PPP http://www.upstreaminter.net.
In other countries you’ll have to dig around a bit to find an appropriate supplier.
My point was that ML-PPP isn’t a function of the modems themselves, but the software behind them. Hence external modems alone aren’t a solution, fundamentally the only way for ML-PPP to work is for MT to implement it in RouterOS. Once ML-PPP is supported it would be easy to also support the Sangoma S518 as the generic WANPIPE drivers are already implemented in RouterOS for other Sangoma products, it only needs a configuration screen for the S518 to be constructed.
External modems come in two types, ones that support IP bridging and those that only support PPPoE bridging, both types have their own problems. IP bridging really needs more than one public IP address to work properly as you need a public IP for the modem and at least one other for the MT router behind it. Using PPPoE bringing means the MTU value has to be reduced to a maximum of 1492, but it seems that some websites break with MTU values below 1500. I’ve given up using PPPoE bridging as I just can’t make it work reliably.
Using external modems either needs a USB port or Ethernet port per modem. Whilst many PC based MT router solutions will have four or more USB ports, they are unlikely to have more than two Ethernet ports without implementing extra network cards. I suspect that using external USB modems may also not be an optimum solution as the USB posts share interrupts, whilst PCI ports also sometimes share interrupts there is at least the possibility of optimising the system to reduce or eliminate interrupt sharing. There is also the logistics of power, each external modem needs a power supply, whereas internal Sangoma modems give you a neat integrated solution rather than a birds nest of wires and external devices.
) as well as DHCPD failover which is something else we need.